The federal Department of the Interior has awarded the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission more than $800,000 for recovery efforts for American martens, Wisconsin's only state endangered mammal - that many people have never heard of.
Martens have been trapped for their fur for various purposes. Jonathan Pauli is a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He said silvicultural practices and logging within local national forests altered martens' preferred habitats.
"This work is really trying to understand how do we manage habitat in a meaningful way," said Pauli, "on these working landscapes, to increase marten habitat, and connectivity of these different subpopulations, to ensure martens are here for the foreseeable future."
Pauli said the grant money - from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's America The Beautiful Challenge - will bring together a diverse group of folks from the federal, state, tribal, and academic levels over four years. They'll create a forest management proposal - with recommended habitat improvements for marten recovery in Wisconsin.
The project will also include training for future biologists and ecologists.
In the 1930s, martens were considered regionally extinct. A series of regional reintroduction efforts has spanned nearly 60 years.
Pauli said martens play important cultural, economic, and ecological roles - including the ability, as predators, to keep rodent populations at bay that are important carriers of diseases such as Lyme's Disease.
Martens are also good dispersers of seeds for foods such as blueberries, and are culturally significant to the Ojibwe or Chippewa people.
With varying degrees of chestnut brown furs, they have distinct golden throats and are the size of a cat, with semi-retractable claws that help them navigate through forests and snow.
"They actually live and hunt underneath that snowpack," said Pauli, "that they can slink in and out from underneath the snow where they can hunt all the mice that are living underneath the snow - and then pop up out of the snow bank. And they have big feet like snowshoe hares, almost, where they can surf on top of the snow."
Pauli said it's a real treat when you actually get to see one because they are so rare and cryptic.
For the first time in a century, martens were spotted this year on Lake Superior's Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin.
Ecology experts say this gives them hope for a positive recovery trend for the rare mammal.
