NOTES AND QUERIES.
MAMMALIA.
carnivora.
Pine Marten in Ireland.—It will perhaps be of interest to your correspondent, Mr. W.W. Flemyng (p. 141), and to other Irish naturalists, to learn that I have five living adult Pine Martens from Ireland. The species is decidedly less rare there than in the three other divisions of the British Isles, but Irish naturalists and the Martens at large will thank me not to indicate the precise localities whence my specimens come. One of them I obtained so recently as the end of February, and in the early morning of the last day of March she gave birth to a litter of young, apparently two in number. Young Martens are, as I discovered in 1882,[1] pure white at birth, beginning to get grizzled within a week, and becoming brown within four weeks; but in the present instance, with a freshly-caught mother, inspection was quite out of the question. Assuming, from the date of her capture, that she might be in young, I prepared a suitable cage for her; but not anticipating the increase would take place so early had not shifted her from the small cage in which I had originally placed her. It was impossible then to move her, and hopeless to expect her not to eat the cubs in a small cage containing merely a little bed-box; so I prepared a large box, and adjusted it without noise, so as to fit against one of the narrow openings through which the cage is cleaned, as we could not, of course, block the only door. This opening is little more than two inches high, but she very soon moved the cubs through it into the more spacious and secluded bedroom. Since the first two days, however, I have been unable to certainly distinguish more than a single voice, so it is not unlikely that one cub has come to grief.
Those who are acquainted with Martens (and those only) will appreciate their gnawing powers; and during the night of Easter Tuesday (April 20th–21st) this Marten ripped out a strip from the front edge of the flooring of the bed-box, the width of which was only 1½ in. at the widest point,
- ↑ See 'Zoologist,' 1883, p. 203. The same pair of Martens bred again in 1884 and 1885, and both eventually died well on in their seventeenth year (at least).
