AUTHOR JOHN FAIRFAX-BLAKEBOROUGH summed up the pine marten beautifully in 1921, declaring that “he is the wildest of the wild things left to us, and all his habits and instincts make for secrecy and isolation”.
Considered Britain’s second commonest carnivore (behind the weasel) in its Mesolithic heyday 6,000 years ago, the pine marten then began a long and tragic downhill slide. Initially it struggled with the clearance of Britain’s woodlands, then trapping for its fur morphed into a ruthless eradication of the species, regarded as ‘vermin’ by the