English pine marten caught on film for first time

Dave Pearce’s original picture of an English pine marten taken in Shropshire.

After five years of dedicated searching a pine marten has finally been captured on video in a secret Shropshire location.

We're not allowed to say exactly where as there is intense interest in the discovery. Perhaps most exciting of all, having looked at the footage, there might be more than one of them.

This is the culmination of a five year dream and the driving force behind it all has been Stuart Edmunds of Shropshire Wildlife Trust.

After seeing pine martens in Scotland he became interested, some might say obsessed, with the idea of tracking them down in England and in particular Shropshire.

Sniffer dog

Stuart has deployed social media, an army of volunteers and a network of motion detecting cameras. We went to meet him one afternoon when he was unleashing Luna the pine marten sniffer dog as part of his huge effort to track a pine marten down.

But after five years with no confirmed sightings Stuart was having some doubts.

If there are pine martens in Shropshire they will have spread over the border from Wales where there may be slightly more of them.

But even the mighty BBC Springwatch failed in its attempts to film Welsh pine martens. (Although its blogpost has some useful tips on how to tell your pine marten from a pole cat and other mammals.)

Everything changes

Then two months ago Dave Pearce was out for a walk on a Sunday evening and out of the corner of his eye caught a flash of something dark bounding through the undergrowth.

He had binoculars with him but rather than look through them he grabbed his camera instead.

He raised it to his eye, shot off a series of pictures and in just two of them he caught on film the first definitive proof in a century that English pine martens exist.

After just 20 seconds the pine marten disappeared but those pictures would go on to change everything.

Dave is a wildlife recorder and he knew what he had seen.

Eventually he was put in touch with Stuart and when Stuart opened the email and saw the pictures he had to sit down immediately.

After a visit he confirmed the sighting and Dave's pictures ended up in all the papers.

Just the start

However this was just the start for Stuart. He wanted to deploy his motion detecting cameras and actually record the pine marten on video.

Something that has never been done before. The last few weeks have involved a series of site visits, checking his cameras every time.

Would the pine marten be tempted by an array of tasty chicken to perform in front of the cameras?

A still from the first confirmed video footage of an English pine marten.

Buzzards, badgers, foxes and even deer put on a show and then a glimpse of pine marten.

In fact not just a glimpse a pine marten almost showing off for the camera on several different occasions. This wasn't just one animal passing through a territory, instead it looked like this was prime pine marten country and on examining the footage another extraordinary discovery. Perhaps these were different animals in the videos. Not a single pine marten but a small group living in secret in a Shropshire valley.

So now the work continues. The next step is better cameras and to capture a pine marten in HD. Stuart will also be putting out "hair traps". Sticky tubes which retain pine marten hair when they pass through them. The aim is to do DNA analysis and see if these animals are related to the Welsh pine martens. Plus Shropshire Wildlife Trust has launched an appeal to help fund this new research and to manage this land for the benefit of pine martens. You can read more about the appeal here.

Thanks to the dedication of Stuart we now know the pine martens of Shropshire are not extinct after all. A five year quest ends a century of rumour and doubt. The English pine marten is back.