Spacing Marten boxes

[nube]

How far apart do you guys space your marten boxes along your lines? Do you put them in certain spots or just space them out along the trail every half mile kinda thing?

[mark-edmonton]

I try to put mine where the bush transitions from hardwoods to heavy evergreen! I look for a likely visible spot. I only elevated 5 sets last year and didn't catch one. All my catches were in boxes laid on the ground. Edges of swamps and beaver ponds. And anywhere else I see marten/fisher sign!

[Torkdiesel]

In good spruce / pine forests I set every .6 to 1 km apart. Farther when it's mixed bush 1.5 to 2 km.
All my marten sets are elevated. I set along poplar / spruce transitions and along any ridges my trails cross. Along creeks and the tops of draws are great funnels for them. I also put up boxes at heavely concentrated rabbit sign, these ones I move year to year depending on where the sign is.
I keep track of the location of every marten or fisher I catch and move 25% of my boxes that don't produce each year. It's something my old man does and I just kinda adopted it. Some spots produce constantly while others never while even though they look great in theory.
I kinda look at it like a giant game of chess, it's fun mapping out your area and concentrating on your higher producing areas.

[jim summit]

Same as Tork, some areas catch year after year and the next area looks great but no marten.
Set on tracks, marten use the same general area over time.

[braggadoe]

Originally Posted by jim summit

some areas catch year after year and the next area looks great but no marten.

i heard from several different people, the previous trapper that had my line. had a spot that produced 40plus marten out of one box, in one season. and consesnedenly(spelling?) produced 2 doz +/_.

even more interesting is that he was pretty much a 100 marten guy, then quit for the season. which means a pretty good portion of his catch came from one spot/one set. he still ran alot of traps.

i'm still looking for that spot, or even one, half as good.

[KegRiver]

I found pretty much the same thing as everyone else here.

Some locations produce well while others produce little or nothing and like the others I found that the trick is to set where I see tracks consistently.

But to add to that, I found that Marten and Fisher seem to prefer to travel from one stand of evergreens to another via corridors and from evergreen stands to feeding areas, (rabbit haunts mostly) also via corridors.

In other words, they don't seem to follow trails but rather forest features, like waterways, edges of forest types and elevations. For instance, one of my more productive sets was in a long, narrow lowland black spruce swamp surrounded by Jack Pine ridges.

The Marten traversed the area using this lowland swampy area, both as a travel corridor and as a bedding area. And this swamp was also a favorite for the rabbits in the area.

For me it took a few years to figure out where the best locations were.
The first several trips through an area for the first time, I would set wherever I saw tracks, but over time I found that some locations would have tracks once in years while others had tracks every time I passed through. The latter were consistent producers, the first almost never produced anything.

There were a couple of places that I set just because they looked good.
There were no tracks the first time I set, but the set produced fairly consistently over the years.

I figure what was happening was that the area was good but I wasn't right on the travel corridor, but close enough to draw Marten to my set with a call scent.

By the way, something I have not heard talked about here.

One of the tricks we used. When we had enough beaver carcasses, we would cut a beaver in half, tie that half onto the end of a long dry pole and lean the pole on a tall willow or similar spindly support close to a set.

The idea was, the birds would pick at the bait but Marten and Fisher had a hard time getting to it and they couldn't drag it away.
This worked as a long range call lure.
The birds kept fresh meat exposed which resulted in strong scent and their chatter drew predators. It also kept the birds out of our sets and away from our catches as they were kept busy with the bait.

We found that using this trick we could catch close to 50% more fur per set then with just a baited set and call lure.