"One
Day Love Affair"
April
22, 1999
Last week I fell in
love with a pine marten. Ok, so maybe that's a
bit dramatic, but if you could have been there
and seen what I saw, you would be saying the same
thing.
I had spent the weekend up in Jasper
driving around hoping to find a bear fresh from
hibernation, but had been skunked. On my drive
back down to Canmore, I took the Bow Valley
Parkway between Banff and Lake Louise as I
usually do.
I had gotten so desperate to get something out
of the trip that I stopped to photograph a ground
squirrel sitting on top of its burrow near Castle
Mountain. It was while I was sitting there
waiting for this ground squirrel that I first
spotted my pine marten bounding through the
forest in the distance.
Since my camera and lens and tripod were all
assembled and ready, I slowly stood up and began
to creep towards the marten, which was dutifully
hunting along from tree to tree. The first image
on the right is about ten seconds after the
marten first spotted me...she leapt up into a
tree and stared right at me long enough for me to
set up and pop off 4 quick shots.
For the next few minutes, she raced from tree
to tree and hopped up onto each trunk to get a
better look at me and I think to try to decide if
I was dangerous or not and would warrant climbing
up higher. For whatever reason, the marten
quickly seemed to forget that I was even there
and began to hunt again right in front of me.
That was the beginning of one of the most
incredible wildlife experiences of my life. For
the next five hours, this little marten and I
traipsed through the forest together, doing what
a marten does best.
I watched her stalk, catch and eat three mice
and a vole and miss countless others in blurred
flurries of action that I didn't even bother
trying to photograph. She soaked in the sunshine
on top of logs, she climbed trees for no apparent
reason, she sat and stared at me for long periods
of time (and would slowly close her eyes after a
while as if to say, can't you do anything more
exciting than take my picture?).
I sat fifteen feet from her when she took her
first nap under a spruce tree. I was in the
sunshine and so was she, so for an hour and
fifteen minutes we basked in the warm sun
together and I thought to myself over and over
again that life doesn't get any better. I finally
decided to get up and go back to my car and leave
and when I did, she didn't even budge, just a
quick glance up to see where I was going.
Two hours later, I came back again to see if
she was still under the spruce tree, but she had
left. I began to walk in a big circle through the
forest to see if I could find her again and as
soon as I started talking (which I had been doing
for most of our encounter), she came bounding
from about a hundred yards away up onto a log
twenty yards in front of me. It was so
unbelievable that I can't even put it into words.
If it's at all possible, I would swear that she
had missed not having me around.
For another hour, we stayed together and she
caught the vole that is pictured to the right in
the series of images. After eating it, she curled
up in a ball and slowly nodded off, less than ten
feet from where I was sitting.
I backed up to take a few final pictures, then
said my sad goodbyes and headed home for good.
I have gone back there four times this week
and haven't had any luck finding my little
marten, but maybe that's how it was supposed to
be all along...a one day love affair.
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