Wildlife experts have been combing the woods of the North-East picking up what they hope might be pine marten poo. Darlington naturalist Ian Bond joined them.

WHEN I was younger, my ambition was to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti. I never got as far as Nepal; in fact I only got to Inverness once, but I needn’t have worried. The North-East has its very own cryptic creature. Not the Lambton Worm, nor a monkey in a sailor suit, but a fleeter, furrier phantom – the pine marten.

Once upon a time, pine martens were probably the second most common carnivore in Britain, but that was a few thousand years ago, before we learned how to smelt iron and cut down lots of trees. Since then, things have rather been going downhill for pine martens. Being a member of the weasel family, they suffered – as did all things with fangs or claws or hooked beaks – at the hands of gamekeepers, but they have always been a marked beast on account of their fabulous fur. In fact, pine martens are almost the same species as the sable, a creature whose name is synonymous with fur coats.

All right, so pine martens aren’t quite in the Loch Ness monster class: it is known that they exist, it’s just that no one knows for sure whether they exist in the North-East. They are supposed to have died out in Durham in the last two decades of the 19th Century, with the last recorded sighting in Northumberland being at Bardon Mill in 1905.

They hung on longer in the Yorkshire Dales, though with such uncertainty that Anthony Dent in his book, The Lost Beasts of Britain, published in 1974, in which he charts the disappearance of some of Britain’s most notable fauna, describes the pine marten as having vanished from England in his lifetime. Interestingly, Dent was writing from the North York Moors, where it seems that sightings of pine martens are enjoying something of a resurgance.

NORTH Yorkshire mammal enthusiast Derek Capes, from Great Ayton, has been ferreting away compiling a list of pine marten reports from the North York Moors and has come up with more than 50 sightings. Although most of the reports that Derek has collected are recent, they stretch back over a period of 40 years, indicating a continuity of pine marten presence in this area. There was even a report of a pine marten being killed and buried at Ingleby Greenhow in 1993, with the animal later being exhumed to prove it. However, such were the doubts that pine martens could still exist south of the Scottish border that one leading mammal expert commented that all it proved was that someone had buried a pine marten there.

The animal’s X-files image isn’t confined to Yorkshire. In 2004, The Northern Echo reported that a wolverine has been spotted in the County of Durham. The creature obviously had a feeling for alliteration and turned up on moors between Rookhope and Ireshopeburn, thus becoming the Weardale Wolverine. It was seen on two occasions by the same motorist, who described it as being a big, ferret-like creature, almost as long as a badger. Now the chances of there being a wolverine in Weardale are about as remote as finding a sabre-tooth in Sacriston, but then a wolverine is essentially just a beefed-up pine marten with attitude so perhaps, as one correspondent in the following week’s paper suggested, Durham has pine martens again.

The situation is complicated by potential releases of martens from fur farms. Some supposed pine marten road casualties from Northumberland had DNA samples taken for analysis. It was found that their roots were in Queen Charlotte Island, in Alaska, because they belonged to a sub-species of the American Marten and had presumably escaped from fur farms. What was particularly worrying about this was that as well as being over here, they might also have been over-sexed and hybridised with any pine martens that they encountered.

For some years now, the conservation charity the Vincent Wildlife Trust has been on the animal’s trail.

It has logged more than 1,000 possible sightings of pine martens in England and Wales though still, the Ingleby Greenhow corpse notwithstanding, without definitive proof of their existence. They recently launched their Prospects for Pine Martens project, which includes a “hot pursuit” approach involving staff racing to the location of a possible sighting at short-notice and organising an intensive short-term survey.

As you may have gathered from the above, you would have to be pathologically optimistic to go looking for pine martens in the North- East and expect to find one. Indeed, in the larger commercial forests the dense conifers make the chances of seeing any mammal that doesn’t have two legs and a mountain bike pretty slim. The Vincent Wildlife Trust’s approach therefore is to fall back on that standard piece of information about mammals… their droppings.

It used to be thought that pine marten droppings were quite distinctive with a smell like parma violets that gave it its alternative name of the Sweet Mart. Recent research has shown that even an expert eye (and nose) can’t definitely tell them apart from fox droppings and what were some of the best records have had to be discounted.

Last year, the trust prospected for pine marten poo in the forests of Wark and Kidland and Harbottle, in Northumberland, but despite some “exciting” finds (have I convinced you to stick to bird watching yet?) none of it had ever been in a pine marten.

This year, attention turned to Hamsterley Forest, County Durham’s largest tract of woodland, from where there had been reports of pine marten in the recent past.

ON a scorching hot Saturday in early August I joined a group of about 20 enthusiasts hoping to solve the mystery. After being given instructions on where to look – tree stumps and trail crossroads are favourite spots apparently – how to collect evidence and especially how to avoid DNA cross-contamination, we divided in to pairs and then divided the forest up between us.

I was paired with Tony Summerson, a former North Yorkshire bobby who patrols the moors in his spare time looking out for rare wildlife of all kinds. He has helped scrape droppings “big enough to make their eyes water” off the top of purpose-built pine marten boxes in Silton, only to find that the DNA results come back as being from the much smaller stoat.

My search strategy was based on dashing around tree stumps and rocks like a spaniel let off the lead.

Tony ambled sedately but with a sharper eye that registers anomalies and rules out the commonplace in an enviably effortless manner.

I quickly fell into line and we ambled together, but the forest was surprisingly lacking in any small deposits proclaiming its owner’s territory. After an hour or so of drawing a blank we were getting a bit desperate and the mind started playing tricks. I embarrassingly seized upon a squashed slug; Tony prods a bit of black plastic bag that’s twisted like a weasel dropping. As it turned out the only dropping that we found all day that wasn’t a rabbit carling was a small amorphous blob, baked in the sun and run over by numerous mountain bikes. It didn’t look like it had come out of a pine marten either, but we couldn’t go back empty-handed, so it went in the bag.

As it turned out no one else had any luck either though everyone managed to scrape something into the bag to save face. So in a relatively small forest thronging with people and pursued by science the pine marten had managed to elude its trackers yet again. I think I’m beginning to understand why no one has found the Yeti.

■ If you think you have seen a pine marten in the North-East the Vincent Wildlife Trust would love to hear from you. Call 01531-636441 or visit their website at pinemarten.info