Animal · Germany, Poland, Sweden
Pine marten
Martes martes — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The pine marten is a slender forest hunter with a creamy yellow bib on its throat, and it climbs through the treetops like a squirrel. Its yellow patch is the quickest way to tell it apart from the stone marten, which prefers houses and sheds.
Picture credit: Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Green Yoshi (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the pine marten live?
Home: in old forests with plenty of hollow trees.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 50 cm plus a 25 cm tail. It weighs about 1.5 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
A pine marten spends most of its life above the ground. It runs along branches, leaps gaps of three or four metres and can turn its ankles almost backwards to climb down a trunk head first. By day it sleeps in a hollow tree, an old squirrel drey or a woodpecker hole, and it changes bed often. At night it hunts voles, birds and beetles, but in late summer it fills up on bilberries and rowan berries instead. For a long time martens were trapped for their soft fur, and the animal disappeared from many woods. Where old forest has come back, so has the marten, and in Britain it is slowly spreading again.
Find it on the globe
Pine marten is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How can I tell a pine marten from a stone marten?
Look at the throat. The pine marten's bib is cream to yellow and in one piece; the stone marten's is white and often split into two prongs. The pine marten also has bigger, pale-edged ears and a dark nose.
Where do pine martens live?
Can a pine marten really climb down a tree head first?
Yes. Its ankle joints turn almost backwards, so the hind claws can still grip the bark while the animal walks down face first. Squirrels use exactly the same trick.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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