Demo set connected.

I put a trap and bait in the demo set I made a few days ago.
Connected today.
Juvenile male.




Two tone tail on that one.Dk brown on top bright orange on bottom.

Very nice! Will have to keep a tally as to how many you catch at that set!

Chris

Wow. Look at all that colour. What a treat to see that swinging through the trees in winter !

Nice set and even better that it connects. Your tutorials are great. Thank you for posting about different furbearers.

Very pretty marten. Some day I will have to get one to make a pouch from. Can't trap them here in WI.

Cool deal Boco.

great job beautiful marten

I will give you this, your trapping posts are worth reading. Good job and congrats.

By the way, your tanning thread was great. I did a few up and it worked great. Thank you.

Verification of my assesment on age of the marten.



Juvenile.

Juveniles come already skinned, or what?

Nice set up , and catch. Interested in why on a pole away from the tree.
How it doesn't tip downward over time .
2-3 nails for support ?

See those two temporal muscles on the top of the skull?
On a male marten they are divided by a strip of bone when they are under a year old.
As they age the temporal muscles on the top of the head grow together.if they touch along the top of the head that marten is not a juvenile.

Marten trappers use data on sex and age ratios in their harvest to tell them when to quit trapping so as not to harm the line.
juveniles and adult males are the target-Marten trappers managing the resource on an RTL avoid the harvest adult female marten as much as possible.
When the ratio in your catch drops below 4 juvenile and or adult male marten to each adult female it is time to stop trapping.
Some years there are a lot of juvenile marten in the harvest some years not so many.

Would like to catch a marten. There isn't any in this area. Would have to travel a few hours north to get into them.

Check out my demo - marten set thread-shows how to construct the set.

Great threads lately Boco. You are a bastion of good info.

Congratulations

Very Nice!!!

Demo set strikes again.
Another juvenile male.

Is catching the bait by design?

He likely had a bite on it when he triggered the trap.

Kinda figured that, but at least you can reuse.

Yup...bait a wee bit too close to the trap.

But fur is fur

The bait is often gone after a catch,I always carry a bucket of bait chunks when I have a lot of sets out to check.
In winter I also put fresh bait every two weeks or so,and collect the old bait (if any left)and dump at a jackpot. Some years bait doesnt last long with all the shrews and mice eating on it steady..

He's A Pharaoh wanted to bring the bait to the Afterlife

Shrews and voles are climbing the tree and eating the bait?

Yes they feast on it.They can clean out a fist sized chunk of frozen beavermeat in one to two week.
Often when I shake the snow out of an upright box with the axe several will scurry out of the box.
Their activity at the bait box is a major attraction for marten.
Same as bird and other animal activity at a jackpot.

Often greenhorns will just drive their snowmachine past their boxes in the bush and if there is no catch and the 120 is still set they drive on,never actually checking the sets close up.

They will check empty traps for a month before they find out there is no bait left.LOL.

Confirmed-another juvenile male marten.


Full pods on this one.

Boco.i was wondering...when running your wilderness line for marten, how often do you check your sets?

I start setting up longer lines for marten once the weather gets and stays below freezing-thatd be mid november here.
I like to check each line once every 5 days.
When season starts oct 25 it is too warm to run any kind of longer line,since marten taint quickly in warm weather,so have to check each day.
If I am doing some trailwork,daily early in the season I might set up a couple marten boxes along the trail.
if I am at the cabin early I set up a box or two that I can check every day.
If you check marten traps every day you will be checking a lot of empty traps in winter.
You gotta give the traps time to work for you.

I know. We figured every 5 days.

Where Jerry is since he's only there 3 weeks, he has 2 lines, o e had 60 traps and one has 50.

He checks traps everyday,alternating lines.

Do you suspend your marten to keep them from being eaten since you have more time between checks?

Once they are frozen solid in the cold,there is a lot less chance of them getting eaten.
The problem with marten on the ground is shrews voles mice and squirrels clipping the fur for nests on the longer(5-7 day) checks.
Its weird but I never see lynx or fox dead on the ground in snares ever getting clipped.
Marten on the ground here are like a magnet for those little rodents.

Picked up a marten today in a set I made on the beaver trail the other day.Picked up another beaver there also.Forgot to bring the camera though.
I suspect the marten is a juvenile female.i will confirm it later after skinning by looking at the uterine horns.
The temporal muscle coalescence on the top of the head is much less accurate on female marten even though it is 100% on males.The muscles on top of the head on female marten dont close until they are fairly old-a few years after they have first bred.
It is easy to tell an adult female marten from a juvenile by looking at the uterine horns.On a juvenile the uterine horns are threadlike,on an adult female they are noticeably thicker.

Juvenile female marten are good ones to catch.They are the least likely of all to survive the lean times of late winter when the land sets the carrying capacity.

OK,so skinned out this marten and definitively aged it using the uterine horns.
First off I looked at the skull to study the temporal muscles.An old adult female marten will have the muscles touching along the top of the skull like an adult male.
Problem is with females that are adults but not too old,those muscles can remain open showing the strip of bone along the top dividing the two.
With experience if you look at the very back of the skull on a female,the very young juvenile will have an eighth inch space between the temporal muscles at the very back of the skull.
As in this one.



Some juvenile marten later in the winter can have these muscles touching at the very back so not definitive.

A better way to age a female marten that is more definitive in separating juveniles from adults is to look at the uterine horns.

On a juvenile female the uterine horns are like threads,as in this picture.



On an adult female marten the uterine horns are noticeably thicker and darker and look much different than those of the juvenile.

When I catch an adult female I will add to this post and show the difference.

Isn't the horns where the eggs are until they implant in the uterus in the spring? In the adult females? Do you ever find adult females who don't have eggs?

Never looked for eggs in the tubes,strictly looking for the threadlike horns(tubes) to confirm age for ratios to properly manage the harvest.

Hey Boco, what do you think about this? In Maine we need to use lynx exclusion boxes & take in a tooth from every marten. I mostly write down the sex of every animal I catch. In the boxes (first photo) of the last 55 that I recorded 40 were males and 15 were females. With fisher I had 13 males & 19 females during that same period. Second photo shows the age of our marten.

Tooth sectioning is the standard for bios to age animals.Looks like only a bit more than half the catch was aged.With only half the catch aged I dont know how relevant that study would be.When numbers are shared with trappers managing their own animals, that can be very valuable to the trapper as a front line manager.It can verify his own numbers as to age ratios,and lethim know how accurate his own observations/statistics are.
Low numbers of adult females is good.
Something wrong with the sex ratio.
Marten sex ratio of juveniles should be 50-50.or close to it during trapping season.
If trappers are actively avoiding adult females by spacing their sets farther apart there will be a skewed ratio due to that.

My sex counts are accurate. Last two years trapped 65 marten. 40 males 15 females and 10 unknown.

Yep something wrong with the population there with those sex ratios during trapping season.
The sex ratio gets skewed toward males in late winter when the carrying capacity of the land is set.Juvenile female marten are the first to succumb at that time of year,especially after a long hard winter.
But by fall juveniles in trapping season will be 50 50 or close to it,bringing the sex ratios back.

all killed in lynx boxes in November 2020 & 2021

All trapped near logging roads traveling by truck. Could be the females don't travel as much as the males in the more open areas.

If I am reading that graph corrctly,on the avg the adult male/juvenile ratio to adult female is 15 to 1,lol.
Either you guys are doing a fantastic job of avoiding the catch of adult females or there is something buggered with that study.
My very best years ever on my line is 8 to 1.I strive for 4 or 5 to 1 and quit early in the years when it goes below 4 to 1.
Will normally have good enough numbers in a month of trapping to make that decision.

16.7 to 1 is the average.

The trapper tags the lower jaw with the sex. Maybe trapper can't tell the difference.

I suspect something going on with the reporting /submissions,
In years of high juvenile numbers I will bring in my stats and skulls to the fur tech to raise the quota on my RTL's
With lynx it is pelt size ratios to determine number of juveniles in the harvest.
We had strict quotas on fisher years back.The trappers asked the fur tech if a study could be done to see what the ratios in the incidental harvest of fisher in marten sets was.
All trappers in the district submitted their fisher skulls,and we had all teeth sectioned.
The study was repeated over a 3 year period.
Turned out that marten sets were fairly selective for juvenile dispersing fisher at a 9 to 1 ratio over adults of both sexes.
This study resulted in all incidental fisher catches (which had been increasing over the years with the overall forest succession)were used to adjust the quotas.
Trappers now had more realistic quota adjustments made permanent on their ground that reflected the shift in the population dynamic on the land.

Main point being that trappers working with MNR in an honest constructive manner can benefit trappers and the resource.

Things are a little different over here in Maine. First off it is not uncommon to have three or more trappers trapping the same areas. For as long as i can remember the season is two months long, November & December. Until two years ago we had a 25 marten & 10 fisher limit. Now the limits are 25 & 25. Limits makes no sense as many families have two or more people tagging the animals that one trapper catches.
For 2006 - 2015 the average catch was 2174 marten & 1067 fisher. For the past six years the averages have been less than 800 marten and less than 500 fisher. So much for management, The MIFW says the declines are because of less trapper effort. They may be correct or they may not be correct. I do know that 15 years ago our bear hunter would see marten coming to the bear baits. Sometimes three or four marten at the same time. For the past five years I can't remember one hunter seeing a marten at a bear bait.

Picked up another marten today.
I set out 3 more boxes on my trail into camp the other day.I can check them when I go to the camp every couple days to put up wood and do chores.Weather is a bit warm yet to set out a good marten line.Crazy weather for this time of year,plus 15c today.i remember walking to high school back in the early 70's first week of November checking under ice muskrat sets. It was 20c below in early Nov.Hoping for colder weather to settle in mid november so I can activate some marten sets on the North line.
Got 4 marten boxes out now including the demo set.
This is another juvenile male,a nice dark mahogany colour,I will confirm age later when I look at the temporal muscle coalescence.

Confirmed,another juvenile male marten.

Okay, can you please explain how you can tell?

Temporal muscles have not coalesced on top of the head.

I’m guessing the Uterine horns are the Uterus without looking it up. Eggs will implant there and grow.

I’ve seen pregnant dogs get spayed and the uterine horn can have multiple fetuses on each side. They look like golf balls saved ot.

Very good information here, thanks for sharing

Ok, so assuming the purple muscles each side of head (temporal muscles?) are same color (or at least lighter) than surrounding muscles? Good info, thanks. Is this a tell for other animals as well?

Only marten as far as I know.
You can tell the older an animal is by the saggital crest that forms between the temporal muscles on the top of the head.Older fisher especially get a large saggital crest when they get older.
But I believe only on marten can it be used as a guide to differentiate between adults and juveniles.
It is fairly accurate with male marten,but it takes a bit of experience to use it for the females.

Great post, I learn a lot from your posts.

Some fisher heads:

Did you have those aged by tooth sectioning to see if the temporal muscle coalescence progression correlates with known age parameters?
When we did our 2 year study on fisher with our local fur tech,the teeth were extracted for aging as it was felt that temporal muscle coalescence was not accurate on fisher.

No tooth ageing was done. Maine now requires tooth submittal from all fisher & marten. Maybe I'll compare tooth ageing too temporal muscle coalescence. It will take about a year after submittal to have any results.

All the science says it is unreliable in fisher.
There are different ways to get an idea like total head circumfrance, overhang of the saggital crest etc but unlike with marten,none are accurate enough for meaningful assesment.in all sex and age class.
Be interested in what you find out.