Mention of pine martens stimulated a few people to remember brief encounters and stories and odd readings about this "rarest of all Irish mammals", as Fairley puts it in An Irish Beast Book. Peter Fallon, poet and publisher of the Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co Meath, writes delightfully that "ten or a dozen years ago I disturbed some of these lovely creatures in Loughcrew in woods by our house. (I was sawing and suspect the chainsaw was a shock to their systems.) I hadn't known they bred around here and all my enquiries - Natural History Museum, etc. - drew blanks. Some years later my wife hit one in her car and my `secret' was out." He enclosed a typed poem headed "A Flowering". Whether it had already been published or not could not be confirmed. he will not mind a short excerpt being printed here, it is hoped:
They were not on the maps./ Notes of their known habitats/recorded nothing here/ or hereabouts./ I knew them shy, prized, arboreal,/from the realm of heraldry./ Were they real at all,/I wondered till I stood,/ a spellbound witness,/ downwind of a pair of them./ To have watched them is a richness/I've hoarded/ of all my days and doings. . .
The whole poem is splendid for anyone who has seen martens on the move or who longs to do so. Like many wild animals they have had a varied history, with bounties sometimes being given for their corpses and a good trade in their pelts. (Giraldus Cambrensis writes: "Martens are very common in the woods. They are hunted all day and all night by means of fire".*) The trade in pelts makes certain decline. The litter size is given as one to six, mostly three. And one litter per year. Good to look at: rich chocolate brown, cream patch at throat and on part of chest, ears which stand up triangle-wise and cream colour inside. Fairley says that while they are partly arboreal, they prefer open woods with plenty of shrubs and undergrowth. They look cuddly, but their eating habits might put some people off. Fairley, again, tells us that an analysis of droppings over four years showed that their diet covered a multitude of items, including carrion from a dead calf dumped by a farmer; small birds, especially in the lean months of January and February when they are weak; pigeons and waders, game birds and birds of prey, the odd red squirrel and pygmy shrew, frogs and lizards, bees, wasps, wax and honey, worms. And in summer and autumn, fruit, too. Poison spread with bait for various purposes may have killed some. Y