Lost heritage: Bringing American martens back to Pennsylvania

By Anthony Hennen | The Center Square

HARRISBURG, PA — A $2 million Game Commission project would return the American marten to Pennsylvania’s woods, part of a broader effort that’s returned a number of creatures lost to deforestation and overhunting.

A public comment period is open until November 15 to discuss the reintroduction plans for the small weasels, also known as the pine marten, which grow to about the size of “two small cans of beans.”

“This was a species that was a common native species in Pennsylvania that was lost about 120 years ago. It plays very important roles within our ecological community,” Thomas Keller, a furbearer biologist with the PGC and author of the reintroduction and management plan, said.

On Wednesday, Nov. 1, the PGC will host a 30-minute lunch discussion about the plan to educate the public and spur more feedback.

Reintroducing the American marten to the commonwealth isn’t only a restoration project.

“There’s also economic benefits to reintroductions which we have seen many times over with other species we’ve reintroduced, and this overall legacy that Pennsylvanians have really led the nation in rewilding their state, and we have many generations of Pennsylvanians doing that for the last 100 years,” he said.

Diet studies of the marten found that the majority of its diet is small mammals like voles, mice, and shrews, followed by plant material like berries and grasses, and birds. Thanks to its diet, the martin would replace some of what the PGC would otherwise have to do.

“With the marten, one of its beneficial ecological services is seed dispersal,” Keller said. “It’s one of the few mammals that eats a lot of seeds and then has a large home range and moves them around the forest. When it does that, it’s helping the tree and shrub species spread that seed through the forest.”

Martens could also spark some economic benefits to rural Pennsylvania by attracting wildlife enthusiasts, be they hikers, photographers, or hunters.

“They spend a lot of money — when you think about our elk range, the elk was a reintroduced species; over half a million people come up to the elk range, Elk Visitor’s Center each year,” Keller said.

In the reintroduction plan, Keller estimated that the commonwealth could support almost 30,000 martens in theory (though it’s not a goal or a minimum number needed to open up the animal to hunting). Following the standards used by Maine, about 4,600 marten could be “harvested sustainably” after reaching stable population numbers, he noted.

“When we look at our habitat suitability model and try to make a determination as to how many martens (the) habitat could potentially support within the state, it is a very tricky thing to do,” Keller said. “Based on what we found, we estimate just under 10,000 martens within the 24,719 km2 high/optimal suitable habitat. This is conservative, so it would likely be more than that, but again, trying to estimate these numbers based on a model is tricky.”

The commission’s plan would release about 300 martens across five sites in the northern tier. The sites are mostly on public land in Cameron, Clinton, Elk, Lycoming, McKean, and Potter Counties, though final decisions on the sites haven’t yet been made.

Several American states have reintroduced the marten, as well as a few Canadian provinces. Modeling the reintroduction in Pennsylvania off other states, the PGC is trying to avoid the missteps of some projects that failed, mostly due to unsuitable habitat or too few animals released.

After the public comment period closes, a final draft will go to the PGC board as early as January to vote on it; if approved, it could take a year or two to trap and move marten from other populations to start the release in Pennsylvania.

If reintroduction does start, Keller estimates the 10-year plan to cost $2.03 million at a time when the PGC “has reached new levels of financial surplus,” which stood at $253 million at the end of fiscal year 2022.

“There has never been a better time financially to pursue a project such as this,” Keller wrote in the reintroduction plan. “A reintroduction effort would neither pull money away from other research projects, nor from much needed habitat management projects within the state for species in decline.”

Nor would the reintroduction restrict timber management or energy extraction. Like other returning species, the marten would get classified as an experimental population, which “does not afford those species any additional regulatory protection as does classification as threatened, endangered, or even (species of greatest conservation need),” the plan noted.

“This was once a major part of our heritage as far as being in our community, and it was lost,” Keller said. “It’s been lost for so long it’s been forgotten about, but it’s a matter of trying to remind this generation of what it is.”