Welcoming Home the Pine Marten!

We love our Pine Marten Animal Ambassador here at Earth Rangers, his name is Timber! From its incredible ability to skip through trees for hundreds of meters, hunting small mammals and birds along the way, to its amazingly soft and silky fur, we think these weasel relatives are pretty awesome.

Sadly, excessive trapping and habitat loss caused serious declines in Pine Marten populations across Canada. These declines were so big that in some places, the Pine Marten disappeared completely. This was the case in the mountains of Manitoba, and the Parks Canada team knew they had to do something to help. Let’s head west to learn more about an amazing conservation success story that brought the Pine Marten back to the wilderness of Manitoba!

Riding Mountain National Park is located in southern Manitoba. Its old, mature forests provide perfect Pine Marten habitat, and looking around today you might even spot one of these curious critters. You wouldn’t always have been this lucky though! It wasn’t until the early 1990s (years before you were born!) that the Pine Marten called this national park home, thanks to a successful reintroduction by the Parks Canada team.

To begin the reintroduction effort, the team first had to track down Pine Martens living close by that they could relocate. They brought 68 Pine Martens from the nearby Duck Mountains into the park, and they put radio collars on some of the animals so they could track their journey through their new home. They used cameras and track surveys (where they counted the number of Pine Marten paw prints in the snow) to give them an idea of how many Pine Martens were in the park, and they continue to monitor their populations today. Now almost 30 years later, the team is happy to report that the population is stable – and maybe increasing!

This epic story from Riding Mountain National Park is just one example of how a little hard work can make a big difference to the animals we love. Do your part to help protect Pine Martens by starting a Bring Back the Wild campaign today!