Tuesday 23 July was a momentous day for me as I set up 12 bait stations in the Tweed Valley to start the field work for my Master’s dissertation research project. I am doing a part-time MSc in Wildlife and Conservation Management with SRUC (Scotland’s Rural College) and my dissertation research project is under the umbrella of Vincent Wildlife Trust.

The aim of this research is to compare two bait stations that are used in pine marten monitoring —  the T Sniffer and the Giggler — to see if one is better than the other at capturing trail camera footage of the unique markings on pine marten chests, called a bib. Trying to get a clear image of these bibs can be difficult as martens tend to move rapidly and it is difficult to encourage them to face the trail camera in a suitable pose.

These two bait station devices both require the martens to stand on their haunches and reach up for the bait — and provided they are facing the trail camera while they investigate the tasty bait, this can provide a clear view of their bibs.

Being able to identify individual martens is useful when you are monitoring population expansion as you can gather indicative information about the minimum number of pine martens present in an area. If you are monitoring an area over several years, you should see new pine martens appearing and hopefully the number of individuals detected increasing as pine martens become established.

So on a rare sunny day, I met up with a Martens on the Move volunteer from our Tweed Valley Hub, Lisa McLeish (chair of the Scottish Borders Pine marten Group). Lisa, along with Andy Beverley, Countryside Ranger at Bowhill Buccleuch Estate, has been instrumental in finding woodland sites with landowners happy to have bait stations and trail cameras on their land.

Armed with the bait stations, trail cameras and bait we set off around our six chosen sites, planting the bait stations in the ground with the bait receptacles about 50cm above the ground — the height at which most adult martens are able to reach.

The Giggler is a pole set at a 45 degree angle with a suspended ball containing the bait. The angle allows the suspended ball to move freely and be easily accessible.

The Giggler bait station

The T Sniffer is made from pieces of pipe joined to form an upside-down L. The long vertical pipe is pushed a little way into the ground while the short horizontal pipe at the top has holes on one side and positioned facing away from the trail camera, which should ensure that the pine marten will be more likely to face the camera while it tries to extract the bait.

Setting the trail camera on the T Sniffer

We put one Giggler and one T Sniffer around 20–30 metres apart on each site. The bait used in this study is a delicious (if you’re a pine marten) bespoke mix of peanut butter and mackerel. I have been careful to source peanut butter with no additives, just peanuts and a small amount of sea salt. The mackerel is in sunflower oil, which helps to loosen the mix a bit. Hopefully the fishy smell will carry far enough to catch the attention of the local pine martens and bring them to investigate.

I really love doing this kind of research — being out in the field, using trail cameras and hopefully getting many images of the gorgeous pine marten and, of course, potentially learning something new to improve our monitoring methods.

Now that all the bait stations and trail cameras have been set in place, all that is left to do is to wait four weeks and see what the trail camera footage shows. Collection day will be Tuesday 20 August, when I will move the bait stations across to new sites near Gatehouse of Fleet to repeat the whole process. I am so grateful to Roland Ascroft and Peter Garson, volunteers from Dumfries and Galloway Pine Marten Group (Martens on the Move collaborators) who found this new site for my project — we really do have the best volunteers!

I’m looking forward to (hopefully) poring over many images of pine martens and to discovering whether one of the bait stations gets better bib images than the other, which we can use in future pine marten monitoring work. Watch this space!

Victoria Chanin, Project Officer for Martens on the Move