A Pine Marten Visits

The other day we found this offering on the wall in front of our terrace. Since we had filmed a mink down at the bay below the house a few days earlier, we wanted to know whether this was a mink's efforts or a pine marten's, so we set up the trail camera to check.

As the video shows, our visitor was a pine marten, and he's been back for the last three nights. He's preferable to a mink - we'd have asked someone to lay a trap if it had been a mink - but we don't like pine martens close to the house as we've heard some fairly bloody stories of encounters between pine martens and cats - and our two cats sleep the night round the back of the house.