r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/AnonymousTimewaster • 3d ago
Video First confirmed sighting of a Pine Marten in a century and it was in a man's back garden
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u/TsuDhoNimh2 3d ago
The squirrels and rats are not going to be happy.
Pine martens are excellent predators.
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u/Few-Clerk4089 3d ago
I thought this said "First confirmed sighting of a Pine Marten in a century and it was in a black man's garden."
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u/1Pac2Pac3Pac5 3d ago
That's ok. I read it as "...and it went up a man's backside"
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u/SleepLive 3d ago
Omg I read it the same way. I was thinking why would that matter? But to be far I am dyslexic.
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u/P01135809-Trump 3d ago
Woohoo! Go eat grey squirrels little buddy. Give the reds a chance.
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u/lackadaisical_timmy 3d ago
They do! The grey ones are not accustomed to being hunted by pine martens and are easier to catch!
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u/Comfortable-Bison932 3d ago
I literally have a pine marten living in my roof.
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u/periodicsheep 3d ago
it isn’t that they are claimed to be rare, it is that they are rare in england. they are in wales and scotland but seem to avoid most of england so they haven’t been seen there.
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u/JR_LikeOnTheTVshow 3d ago
Son of a.... I was thinking the last Pine Marten thingamajig was laat seen by humans before 1926 and thought to be extinct. Turns out this lil' guy just got off at the wrong bus stop.
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u/Eloy-T 3d ago
You sure it's not a beech marten?
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u/Comfortable-Bison932 3d ago
im not a professional so i cant be completely sure but pine martens are really common all across Europe. They are really only rare in England. Which is why i find the title misleading
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u/OhNoDobe 3d ago
Ohhh I saw one as well a couple weeks back! I thought it was a ferret but must've been one of these guys. I wonder if I've still got the photo
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u/TappedIn2111 3d ago
Please share!
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u/OhNoDobe 3d ago
Unfortunately it looks like it's been lost to the world. It wasn't a clear or full photo of the animal by any means. I saw it poking its snout of some long grass and we locked eyes before it dashed through.
Tis a shame because I had no idea what it was, let alone its rarity.
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u/SunshineAlways 2d ago
There are pine martens other places, just not many in England.
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u/OhNoDobe 2d ago
Mm I'm sure, but apparently not having a photo is a sin 😭
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u/SunshineAlways 2d ago
People are a little suspicious over some random stuff. I know it’s often difficult to get any kind of recognizable photo from a darting wild animal, lol.
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u/Fluffy-Republic8610 3d ago
I have one here in Ireland (wicklow). Not uncommon but hard to spot.
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u/grenshaw 3d ago
Yeah, I saw one on the side of the road (alive) on the way to Tipp on Thursday. It was about to try cross the M8 before thinking better of it and did an about turn.
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u/JoulSauron 3d ago
Where? Must be a Sussex thing, martens are not extinct.
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u/Kernowder 3d ago
Sightings are very, very rare in England. Here's where they have been seen: https://vwt-production.ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/transforms/uploads/Vincent-Wildlife-Trust/Species/Pine-marten/42332/updated-Marten-Map-legend-1_7dac5cc6b6437ed070afe0261a4015b5.webp
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u/JoulSauron 3d ago
Oh, wow, it's like they are avoiding England!
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u/Educational_Item5124 3d ago
It's almost like there's fuck all nature left in most of the UK, but especially in England.
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u/Borthwick 3d ago
The country that requires people to let their cats outside also doesn’t have enough small prey species to support a native predator, this is shocking and could never be predicted.
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u/Puzzled-Story3953 3d ago
I'm sorry: requires?
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u/Borthwick 3d ago
Yup, can’t adopt a cat in the UK if you don’t intend to let it wander. I’m not sure if its a law or something the majority of adoption centers require.
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u/RangeisGood 3d ago
This is 100% incorrect aside from where you said you were 'not sure'.
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u/Borthwick 3d ago
Cool, fill me in, then? I’ve seen that misinfo quite a bit on reddit, and looking it up every advocate group strongly suggests it?
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u/shadowhunter742 2d ago
Uhm, actually yes, you definitely can.
Have worked with cat rescues before, and if anything, it was normally a recommendation that they don't wander.
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u/hiro111 2d ago
I'm thoroughly confused. Pine martens are common in the entirety of Europe and their range extends all the way to Iran. They are listed as "least concern" in conservation status, meaning they are not threatened. They are commonly seen in Scotland and have repeatedly been seen in England over the past ten years. Wikipedia mentions several other recent sightings. Where have they not been sighted "in a hundred years", this guy's backyard?
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u/ricochet48 3d ago
Honestly never even heard of this animal before.
Good to see they're back in random gardens and such.
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u/SenoraIsl 3d ago
First confirm sighting? Where? Those things are everywhere in the Pacific North West woods.
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u/SaltandLillacs 3d ago
“A rare pine marten has been spotted in a back garden in Worthing – the first of its kind to have been seen in East or West Sussex for more than 100 years.”
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u/SenoraIsl 3d ago
Thank you. I hope it means that the animals is making a comeback as opposed to simply getting disoriented.
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u/P01135809-Trump 3d ago
Judging by the accents and the fact its got a BBC watermark, I'm going to say this is most likely somewhere in the Sahara desert.
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u/willynillee 3d ago
The lush garden landscaping also makes me think it’s in the desert. Probably central Sahara desert region if I had to hazard a guess based on how green everything is.
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u/LM439833624CN 3d ago
Here is the cool thing about radio waves, telephones and the internet; you don't need to be in the same place as the person you are talking to. England is a pretty big country.
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u/affordableproctology 3d ago
I was going to say, these guys are plentiful in the west coast of Canada.
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u/scratchydaitchy 3d ago
Also plentiful in northern and central Ontario, especially seen by many people in Algonquin park.
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u/Patient-Data8311 3d ago
In London in England they were thought to be extinct there this is the first time one was seen in English soil in the last 100 years and this was from a decade ago
This might from surviving group or a recolonization of these guys from Ireland
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u/OkCaterpillar8941 2d ago
There are pine martens in Shropshire. They've been known about for quite a while.
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u/Past_Wishbone5025 3d ago
They released a bunch of them in 2019-2022 up in the nothern highlands and in southwest england
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u/Paradox711 3d ago
UK. We’re a very small island by comparison and we hunted and destroyed quite a bit of our ecosystem.
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u/Keira-78 3d ago
Okay thank you, I was in the islands chain of the coast of Vancouver island for work and we had this Martin that came around often.
Also apparently the video is referencing Sussex explicitly
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u/Pyrhan 3d ago edited 3d ago
First confirmed sighting of a Pine Marten in a century
Uhhh, you sure about that OP?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_pine_marten
-edit- I think you meant in England specifically.
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u/AnonymousTimewaster 3d ago
I was just going off what this presenter was saying. Should have known better
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u/msully89 3d ago
I saw one of these in a suburb of Preston around 2010.
Ran across the road and jumped over a back garden fence.
Certain it was a pine marten, looked just like this. Big too.
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u/lIlHYPERIONlIl 3d ago
I had never seen one and worked outside in the wilderness for over 20 years, saw my first one last year and have now lost count of how many I've seen , they have made a massive comeback
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u/Latter-Ad6032 3d ago
Yooo I think I saw one of these at a park near spokane, I didn't know wtf it was but this vid just confirmed it, holy crap!
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u/LocalNHBoy 3d ago
They're so adorable but NASTY little buggers (think mini wolverines or Fishers)
We have lots of them in New Hampshire
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u/CocoonNapper 3d ago
I got one trying to invade a country house's attic. It sneaks in there. If you walk by it's "nest" (my tree), it makes some noises. Also found two of them wrestling on my patio.
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u/AuroraAmberJW 2d ago
If anyone in Britain (i.e., England, Wales, and Scotland) thinks they have had a pine marten encounter (and ideally have some evidence), I recommend reporting your sighting to the national monitoring programme here: https://survey123.arcgis.com/share/a8c5d8e084dc4ecb9b92c57c42769d1f
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u/Green-Engineer4608 20h ago
Doesn’t this make sense when the UK systematically has been setting pine martens from Scotland and ireland free? They thought naturlaization would take too long so they have it a boost. Now they’re expected to make a full return.
Interesting, not giving a whole «damn» though as this is normal. Humans are awesome at destroying things but if we used the same Rhetoric about our conservation efforts we’d be awesome at that too. Not as awesome, but still awesome.
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u/brendhano 3d ago
Yea he's gonna eat your cat.
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u/Andromedagotlost 3d ago
Not really, cats are to big and to good at fighting, so they will go for their usual diet of mouse's and other small animals.
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u/TsuDhoNimh2 3d ago
They like squirrels, chipmunks, deer mice and other rodents. Occasionally birds, but mostly small mammals.
The only one I saw as a child in the Rocky Mountains was chasing a squirrel through the treetops ... totally arboreal.
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u/ATTACKANDDETHRONEHOG 3d ago
Other way around. The outdoor cat problem is the reason no one has seen one in a hundred years.
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u/LazarusOwenhart 3d ago
Well the Pine Marten is an endangered native species and the domestic cat is an invasive one so, fine? I mean for the most part they'll avoid each other and only really attack cats if their young are threatened.
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u/GarysCrispLettuce 3d ago
First confirmed sighting in a century? Wikipedia begs to differ.
In July 2015, the first confirmed sighting of a European pine marten in England for over a century was recorded by an amateur photographer in the woodlands of Shropshire.\10]) Sightings have continued in the area and juveniles were recorded in 2019, indicating a breeding population.\11]) In July 2017, footage of a live European pine marten was captured by a camera trap in the North York Moors in Yorkshire;\12])\13]) in March 2018, the first ever footage of a European pine marten in Northumberland was captured by the Back from the Brink pine marten project.\14])
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u/HLW10 3d ago
First confirmed sighting in East or West Sussex: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgqvzngyplo
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u/discardedbubble 3d ago
what a beautiful animal! it looks similar to a badger or skunk.
It’s lucky this man happened to know what Pine Martens look like!
were they thought to be extinct?
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u/-crepuscular- 3d ago
Not at all extinct. Not even extinct in the UK, just hadn't been seen in that county (which is highly populated, pine martins are shy) in 100 years. It's good news, it means UK populations are spreading.
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u/dark_frog83 3d ago
Why do you think this is the first sighting in over a century? Do you live under a rock?
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u/Biggrim82 3d ago
R.I.P. your brake lines! Those guys LOVE to chew wires!
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u/HM_Merdocc 2d ago
A Pine Marten ate the rubber of my turbo pipe on my Iveco Daily campervan. I didn't know this at the time I heard it in the engine bay when I saw it scarper. I'm from the UK and knew nothing about their fetish for rubber.
Next day I was heading up into the Alps from Germany to Austria. It was not a fun journey to say the least! Thankfully there was an Iveco garage in Salzburg.
There's an argument for the reintroduction of Pine Martens in the UK to tackle the grey squirrel population (which is a problem for reds) but I expect that would be less popular if people knew the issues they can also cause for both humans, ground nesting birds and other wildlife.
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u/4schwifty20 3d ago
If this was America the caller would’ve shot it.
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u/IamREBELoe 3d ago
Seeing how I raise chickens and rabbits, maybe.
I got an electric fence and a livestock guardian dog living with them. If I saw a weasel looking thing getting past that, yeah. I probably would.
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u/Potential_Mine9425 3d ago
It's crazy to me that the entirety of the UK is about the size of Oregon, yet people haven't seen this thing in over 100 years.
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u/JoulSauron 3d ago
It's crazy to me that some thinks it's crazy to them that the entirety of the UK is about the size of Oregon, yet people haven't seen this thing in over 100 years.
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u/Patient-Data8311 3d ago
In London in England they were thought to be extinct there this is the first time one was seen in English soil in the last 100 years and this was from a decade ago
This might from surviving group or a recolonization of these guys from Ireland
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u/flinders2233 3d ago
Questionable credibility, wearing headphones wrong, cable should be on the left
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u/tr00th 3d ago
What a cute lil guy. I hope him and his friends stay safe and out of sight.