Bog Myrtle & Peat

When I recently claimed that stoats were my favourite British mammal, I made a mistake. Stoats certainly sit very highly on my list of favourites, but I forgot to include an even better beast in my calculations. I have never seen a pine marten in the flesh, but just knowing that they are out there is a real thrill. As a ferret enthusiast, I could hardly fail to love the twitchy arrogance of a marten, and I was always rather sad to see that they are struggling to survive as a viable population in the highlands of Scotland.

I was surprised and thrilled to hear that pine martens were recently spotted less than twelve miles from the Chayne, and realised that thanks to a reintroduction project in the 1980s, Galloway holds a small population of these cracking little buggers. No longer can I look at pine martens as some kind of dim and distant symbol of the wild highlands, and I now face the real possibility that, if their numbers continue to climb, they will soon be living in the woods around the Chayne.

I hope that they will continue to spread their numbers eastward. It seems mad for conservation projects to pour money into reintroducing boring raptors while simultaneously neglecting to give the same attention to predatory mammals, and the project which brough martens back to Galloway should be given some well deserved respect and praise. I know that they spell trouble for a variety of birds, but if it came to it, I would be more than happy to sacrifice some of my birds in exchange for the chance to see a marten of my own.