NORTH DAKOTA OUTDOORS MAGAZINE

Investigating American Martens

Ron Wilson

Surveying American martens in the Turtle Mountains stinks.

As we follow researchers through thick stands of face-slapping, ankle-grabbing trees in this gorgeous neck of North Dakota, the concoction of skunk and whatever else used to lure martens to the survey sites is strong. It doesn’t matter that the potion is stored in a sealed jar and stuffed into a backpack. It still smells like roadkill as we part the trees with our hands and arms as if we’re doing the breaststroke to get to the next location.

The lure, dubbed a call lure by researchers and trappers alike, also smells like success when these animals answer the call and leave hair samples on the sticky pads in cubby traps and are captured on trail cameras.

“The technique we’re trying out up here is a genetic mark recapture survey, and the only thing we’re capturing from the martens is their hair,” said Stephanie Tucker, North Dakota Game and Fish Department game management section leader. “We’re setting some cubbies that are baited, sort of like a trap, but there’s no part of the cubby that’s going to restrain or hold the marten. They are simply going into these cubbies to investigate a bait or a lure and hopefully leaving some hair samples behind in the process. We identify individuals using genetic analysis based on that hair. And then we’ll determine how many times they come back and visit those sites after we’ve marked them the first time.”

The fall of 2023 marked the second of three years that researchers from Michigan State University have tried to collect marten hair samples. Tucker said the Game and Fish Department is also working with the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa as a significant chunk of the reservation is in the southeastern corner of the Turtle Mountains.

“They have marten within their reservation boundary, too, because these animals certainly don’t adhere to administrative boundaries,” Tucker said. “To get a complete picture of what’s going on in this region, the Tribe is part of that. We are collaborating with them and they’re helping us with the survey within the tribal boundary, which will give us a complete picture for the Turtle Mountain region.”

Inside of a marten trap

The interior of the trap shows the bait used to entice martens to enter the cubby and hopefully leave hair on the sticky, white pads.

Jeff Desjarlais Jr., natural resource director for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, said it’s a good thing the two have joined to learn more about an elusive critter that has been on the landscape for some time.

“We love our partnership with the Game and Fish, and we’ve been talking about doing a marten study ourselves for a while,” he said. “And then Stephanie contacted us, and it was a great opportunity for our staff and myself to learn a lot more about the marten and the practice we want to go with moving forward.”

The American marten is a small member of the weasel family, and people are probably more familiar with its semi-aquatic cousin, the mink.

While martens look similar to mink and are roughly the same size, the former are completely terrestrial and live above the ground in trees where they seek shelter and den in cavities to have their kits. Also, martens have slightly longer hair than a mink, and the throat, chest or chin patch is orange colored on a marten, whereas it’s white on mink.

These terrestrial carnivores eat small rodents, such as mice, voles and squirrels, but they are also opportunistic, Tucker said, and they’ll prey on birds and bird nests as well.

Researcher Jazmyn Toombs attaches a trail camera to a tree. The camera is focused on a cubby trap used to collect hair samples from American martens in the Turtle Mountains.

“In North Dakota, we know American martens have been established in the Turtle Mountain region for several decades. The Turtle Mountain Provincial Park on the Canadian side of the border reintroduced or introduced marten to their forests back in the late 1980s early 1990s. And that’s why martens are on our side of the border as well, they’ve inhabited this entire eco region,” Tucker said. “We’ve had a few confirmations of American martens in the Red River Valley corridor. But here in the Turtle Mountains we have an established breeding population in the region.”

Tucker said first and foremost, the Department is trying to determine with the survey the number of martens in this longstanding population that actually inhabit the Turtle Mountains.

“They have regulated trapping of marten on the Canadian side of this eco region. And we’re interested also in exploring whether or not we can have a sustainable harvest season, a sustainable trapping season for marten,” Tucker said. “But in order to do that, we need to find out how many there are so that we can regulate that trapping season appropriately and make sure we don’t overharvest them.”

Desjarlais Jr. said the end goal of a sustainable harvest season is what the Tribe is interested in, too.

“We want to see our resources here forever and not depleted,” he said. “So, if we don’t have some kind of management plan, we’re not going to be able to sustain that population.”

While the cubby sets are designed to collect hair samples from the martens, trail cameras are also mounted on nearby trees to monitor animals that come in without leaving evidence of their existence.

“After three years of surveying in the woods, hopefully we’ve collected enough individual hair samples to be able to crunch the numbers and get that estimate,” Tucker said. “It would be great if we had some preliminary analysis by the end of 2024. But for sure by 2025, we should know enough, and the analysis would be far enough along to be able to propose a season at that time if the population can handle that based on our abundance estimate.”

The marten hair samples are sent to a lab at Michigan State University where geneticists determine the identification of individual animals. Tucker said her primary collaborators at MSU are Dr. Gary Roloff and Dr. Steven Gray.

Tucker said Canada has had a marten season for about 20 years and she feels pretty confident the Department and Tribe can manage and support a limited harvest season in the Turtle Mountains.

“We just aren’t collecting enough data passively on martens to be able to pull that trigger yet,” she said. “That’s why we’re doing this research project so we can say with confidence, yes or no, we can have a limited, regulated trapping season. And this is what it’s going to look like when we have one.”

Researcher Rachelle Ketelhohn sets a cubby trap on a wildlife management area in the Turtle Mountains.

North Dakota already has a trapping season for fishers in parts of the state. The fisher is related to the marten but is larger and also does most of it’s hunting in trees. Because similar methods are used to trap both species, Tucker said the Turtle Mountain region is currently closed to fisher trapping because there isn’t a regulated, legal season on martens.

“If you’re trapping for fishers, you’re likely going to catch a marten. And because we aren’t far enough along to say whether or not we feel comfortable opening a trapping season on marten, we’ve not allowed fisher trapping here either,” Tucker said. “The hope is that if we can open a marten trapping season, we’d open up this area to fisher trapping as well.”

Researchers will run the genetic mark recapture survey as long as they can, but not to the point where snow will limit access and the ability of researchers to wander the woods and set cubby traps and trail cameras.

“Later in the fall there’s a couple of things going on. One, you have the kits from the spring litters that are mostly full grown and they’re really moving around. So, this is the time of year when our density of marten in an area would be at its highest,” Tucker said. “And two, the later it gets in the year, the hungrier the marten get and the more curious they are about food attractants. And that’s what we’re using to get them to try and entice them to go into the cubbies and leave those hair samples. So, the later in the year, the better because there’s not as much natural food resources out on the landscape, and they’ll more likely come in and investigate and give up some hair samples.”

Return to North Dakota Outdoors November 2023 Edition