U.S. Fish and Wildlife listed the coastal marten a threatened species in 2020, but only recently designated areas in Oregon and California as critical habitat. It is estimated that roughly 400 coastal martens remain living in the world.
Courtesy of Mark Stevens / Center for Biological Diversity
Coastal martens, also known as Humboldt martens, are small, catlike members of the weasel family that live in the coastal forests of Oregon and northern California. The animals were thought to be extinct due to logging and trapping but were rediscovered in northern California in the 1990s. Today, there are only about 400 coastal martens left in the wild, living in four isolated communities. The animals were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2020 and just last month received federal habitat protections after a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity. The conservation group also recently sued the U.S. Forest Service to enforce habitat protections for martens in the Oregon Dunes.
Tierra Curry is a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joins us to talk more about the coastal marten and efforts to protect it.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Coastal martens, also known as Humboldt martens, are cat sized members of the weasel family. They were once common in the coastal forests of southern Oregon and northern California. There are now only about 400 left. These martens were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2020. Two weeks ago, after a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, they received federal habitat protections. And yesterday, the conservation group filed another lawsuit, this one intended to get the U.S. Forest Service to enforce those protections in the Oregon Dunes. Tierra Curry is a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joins now to talk about coastal martens and the center’s ongoing efforts to protect them. Tierra, welcome.
Tierra Curry: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here to talk about martens.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start with what these, I have to say, adorable looking animals look like. For people who have not yet googled it or maybe seen them in person, which seems unlikely, what do they look like?
Curry: I was hoping we were gonna start with how ridiculously cute they are. They are about a foot and a half to two feet long. They only weigh two pounds, and most of them is a fluffy tail, but they have these triangular ears and a cute little face. They’re brown overall but their chest patch is tan.
Miller: What makes the Humboldt or coastal marten distinct from other martens that live in Oregon?
Miller: So, all martens west of the Rocky Mountains are Pacific martens. And the ones that live on the coast of California and Oregon are genetically different from all of those. The genetics is still being investigated. They’re either a subspecies called Humboldt marten, or a distinct population segment called coastal marten. But either way, they’re incredibly imperiled and there’s only four surviving populations.
Miller: What do they like to eat?
Curry: Everything and anything! They are on the lookout for food all the time, because they have to eat 25% of their body weight every day. For them, that’s the equivalent of about eight mice or voles. But at the same time, lots of things want to eat them. So they are constantly hunting, and also trying to stay out of sight so that bobcats and coyotes and other larger predators don’t get to feast on them.
Miller: What was their historical range?
Curry: Originally they were found from Sonoma County all the way up to the Columbia River. One of the things about them is they don’t want to cross open areas. So when there was a lot more old growth forest with closed canopy, they moved around a lot more, and their population was larger. But 93% of those forests have been logged. So now they only live in places that have enough cover for them to be able to hunt without getting eaten.
Miller: So that’s why they don’t like open space, because then instead of eating mice, they get eaten by bobcats, or whatever, coyotes or something.
Curry: Exactly.
Miller: What can you tell us about these populations? You said there are four of them, they’re isolated, and in total, when you add all them up, it’s only 400 or so martens.
Curry: The situation is pretty dire. There are four populations: a tiny population on the Oregon coast around the dunes, and they’re actually gonna be affected by sea level rise, because they only live in the shrubby habitat on the dunes right on the coast. I-5 and the 101 presents a case of them getting hit by vehicles. So, every one of those vehicle mortalities is important because the population is so small.
There’s another population down in southern Oregon, and that one used to be connected to northern California, but a lot of severe wildfires over the last decade have separated those two populations. And then there’s a population in Northern California.
Miller: What does the isolation of these four populations mean for the survival of this species?
Curry: It is not good in the long term. This is one of the principles of conservation biology: the smaller population is the greater risk it has of being wiped out by a catastrophic event, or of getting deleterious genes that accumulate or being susceptible to disease. And so if one of these populations gets wiped out, right now there’s no rescue mechanism, because the habitat between them isn’t appropriate for them to move.
Miller: Your nonprofit first petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list coastal martens under the Endangered Species Act in 2010. But they didn’t achieve threatened status until a decade later. Why did it take so long?
Curry: It has been an uphill battle. One of my colleagues actually chased me across the parking lot with the paper in 2009 saying that they had been rediscovered because they’re so rare and so secretive that before then they were thought to be extinct. One was caught on a camera in the redwoods. And so as soon as the paper published with an idea of where they were and what was threatening them, we petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect them under the Endangered Species act. They denied that petition, so we challenged the decision in court and won. And then they finally got protected, but they’re protected as threatened instead of endangered, and they’re clearly endangered. When a species is first protected, it’s supposed to get a critical habitat designation at the time that it’s listed, and the service didn’t do that either. So as of a couple of weeks ago, they finally have critical habitat protection.
Miller: After you’d sued again, it’s worth pointing out. What does it mean for critical habitat to be designated?
Curry: The protections mainly apply on federal lands. On other lands, there would have to be an activity that was being federally permitted or funded. And what it means is basically, the government agencies can’t undertake or approve activities that would adversely modify the martens’ critical habitat.
Miller: And as you noted, Fish and Wildlife did finally designate that habitat about a week and a half ago, two weeks ago. Can you describe the land that’s included in that designation, and the land that was carved out?
Curry: Yes. They’ve officially designated about 1.2 million acres. And all of these areas are areas where the populations are right now. We were disappointed that they didn’t protect corridors, so that the populations could be reconnected. That’s what it’s gonna take to protect them in the long term, we have to reconnect these populations.
We were also disappointed that they carved out around 49,000 acres on timber company land, in exchange for the timber company doing monitoring and setting aside a small area for them.
Miller: Yesterday, as I noted, your nonprofit announced another lawsuit. You’re suing the U.S. Forest Service for, you say, failing to protect these threatened coastal martens from off road vehicle activity in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. What’s happening in this area?
Curry: When a species is protected under the Endangered Species Act, other federal agencies are required to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service to make sure that they aren’t permitting or authorizing anything that could harm the species. And in the dunes in particular, there are two big takeover events where there’s just too many vehicles out on the dunes, and there’s not enough enforcement to keep them in a sandy area and away from the vegetation where the martens are. And also, people illegally modify their vehicles to be louder than they’re permitted to be. So you just have a massive amount of noise, people riding after hours, people riding off-trail. And this is where there’s a population of around seventy martens.
My colleagues and I actually went out there in March and we saw areas where the off-road vehicles were creating smaller and smaller patches of forest by riding in the vegetation and just blatantly riding off the sand. So we think the Forest Service needs to do more to protect that population, and to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to designate routes, to enforce those routes, to try to do something about the noise level. These events are overwhelming to the Forest Service, and we recognize that, but they have to do something to better protect the martens.
Miller: I should say we did reach out to the Forest Service, they said that they could not comment on this pending litigation, it was in fact so new, just filed yesterday.
So are you are not saying that you don’t want there to be any ATVs in this area, but you just want them to be much more controlled?
Curry: Yes. I want them to stay on the sand and away from the vegetation, and not ride 24 hours and not illegally modify their vehicles to be extra loud.
Miller: What is your best case scenario for coastal marten recovery? In so many ways you’re painting a dire picture of a series of spaced out populations, just on the edge of survival. What’s the scenario that you can envision where they recover?
Curry: The good news is, 14 years later, they’re finally protected, their habitat is finally protected. So that’s a start. Now they’re going to get a recovery plan. And we’re going to push to make that recovery plan include corridors, so that they can disperse between the different populations.
Miller: But would those corridors necessitate broader habitat designations that go on to private timberland, for example, or tribal land, lands that already U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have carved out for various political reasons?
Curry: Yes. There needs to be a stakeholder group that includes all of those parties. And we need an actual map to say, “this is where we have the best hope of restoring marten habitat, and where we could move towards recovery.” And then there just needs to be a large effort to get cooperative agreements or private funding to make those corridors a reality.
One of the things about martens is they’re so high strung that when you capture them, they sort of just have a heart attack. They’re like honey badgers, they’re just always on alert. And so it’s not gonna work to just kidnap them and move them onto public lands, because they’re probably not gonna survive the translocation. So in the long run, we have to have connected habitat.
Miller: Tierra Curry, thanks very much.
Curry: Thank you so much.
Miller: Tierra Curry is a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joined us to talk about endangered coastal or Humboldt martens. There are only about 400 left in four different populations in northern California and southern Oregon.
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