Journey into the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico with Bryan Bird, our Southwest Program Director, and our Wildlands Network partners as they survey for the rare Pacific Marten.
Trail cameras capture images and not animals and cat food is safe for martens.
Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Bryan Bird, Southwest Program Director for Defenders of Wildlife, and we’re out here on the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico with our partners Wildlands Network.
We’re setting out camera traps for Martes caurina, this is the Pacific Marten. We’re looking for these animals up here on the Carson National Forest because they haven’t been seen in many many years and we want to know if they’re still occupying this habitat.
Pacific Marten is a subnivean mammal, which means it lives underneath the snowpack in the winter.
In places like New Mexico in the southwest, climate change is altering snowpack.
We’re going to deploy about 40 to 60 camera traps out here in the forest and we set these traps on the base of these trees and then we put on another tree very close by a can of cat food and some other attractants and we hope that these cameras will capture the marten.
We’re hoping that the information we collect about the presence or absence of marten in this habitat will help the state and NGOs to better manage for these animals and recover this very rare species.
The Pacific Marten is listed by the state of New Mexico as a species of greatest conservation need.
it does not have any federal protection.
We’re hopeful when we return later in the fall that we have a Pacific Marten on our camera traps. In the meantime visit us at defenders.org for more information on how you can help these animals.
