Country & Coast: Cameras trained on North York Moors for proof of England's rarest mammal

THE most elusive animal in Yorkshire continues to be the pine marten.
The pine marten continues to be an elusive species.The pine marten continues to be an elusive species.
The pine marten continues to be an elusive species.

A few years back work began to find conclusive evidence that this large stoat-like creature was secretly living in the thick forestry plantations of the North York Moors. Up to a dozen so-called camera traps, activated whenever movement is detected by the lens, were installed in and around vast swathes of conifers of the kind known to be favoured by England’s rarest mammal. But the pine marten has remained frustratingly camera shy.

How fascinating and yet irritating it must have been, then, for members of the Yorkshire Pine Marten Project to see last week’s live footage of pine martens being broadcast on BBC Winterwatch.

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For while the programme’s infra-red cameras succeeded in capturing remarkable pictures of a pine marten busily gathering eggs left out as bait and caching them elsewhere in the forest. The activity took place 300 miles north in the Cairngorms area of the Scottish Highlands, where the species is well established. All the Yorkshire cameras have managed to catch are foxes, grey squirrels, badgers and roe deer.

But those involved in the hunt for it in the North York Moors are still firmly convinced of its presence. A dead one was discovered there in 1993 and since then there have been numerous unconfirmed sightings.

In the distant past pine martens were abundant across much of Yorkshire, but in Victorian times these beautiful chocolate-furred animals with yellow throats and long bushy tails were shot and trapped virtually to extinction by gamekeepers because they predated the eggs and chicks of pheasants and red grouse. Besides forests they were also present on moorland, and one was found occupying a disused fox earth on Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales.

Fast forward to 2013. No pine martens had been seen alive in Yorkshire for decades, but a camera installed by the wildlife research organisation NatureSpy succeeded in capturing an intriguing image of a shadowy creature on a fallen tree trunk in one of the Forestry Commission’s plantations north of Pickering. It might have been a young fox, although NatureSpy’s James McConnell believes the way it held its long tail straight and a slight hump were more suggestive of a pine marten.

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This year the Yorkshire Pine Marten Project will step up its efforts to finally prove the mammal’s existence. More volunteers are being recruited to help with the work of positioning the cameras. Each one is relocated every 30 days in an effort to cover around ten square kilometres a month.

James tells me there have been several unconfirmed sightings of pine martens in the southern part of the North York Moors National Park, so that is where the project will be focusing its attention in 2016.

A similar project in Shropshire took five years to eventually find one, he says, so everyone knows it is going to take time to obtain conclusive proof that the pine marten is alive and well in Yorkshire.