Where the Canopy Moves Again: The Return of Pine Martens to Exmoor
An Auria Journal Story.
August 17, 2026
Four young kits exploring an Exmoor woodland offer a rare glimpse of a native species beginning to rebuild its place in the South West.
Deep within an Exmoor woodland, a trail camera waits.
Around it, the summer canopy is dense. Ferns gather beneath the trees. Fallen branches soften into the forest floor. Somewhere above, concealed among leaves and old timber, a family is moving.
Then the camera captures them.
A female pine marten appears, followed by four young kits. They climb, investigate and follow their mother through the woodland. For a few seconds, an animal missing from this landscape for generations is visible again.
The footage, highlighted recently by the BBC, provides the first confirmation that pine martens reintroduced to Exmoor are breeding successfully. For the people who have spent years preparing for their return, those few seconds carry extraordinary significance.
A Woodland Animal Comes Home
Pine martens once lived throughout Britain. Woodland clearance and sustained predator control caused their numbers to collapse during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1915, they survived primarily in some of Britain and Ireland’s most remote areas. Today they remain classified as Critically Endangered in England and Wales.
Their return to the South West has required patience. The Two Moors Pine Marten Project released 15 animals on Dartmoor in 2024. A further 19, nine females and ten males, travelled more than 500 miles from healthy wild populations in Scotland to Exmoor in September 2025. Each animal underwent health checks and spent its first days acclimatising within specially constructed woodland release pens.
Seven organisations are involved, led by Devon Wildlife Trust alongside Dartmoor National Park Authority, Exmoor National Park Authority, Forestry England, the National Trust, Somerset Wildlife Trust and the Woodland Trust. The Vincent Wildlife Trust has provided specialist expertise, drawing on decades of pine marten recovery work across Britain.
Tracey Hamston, who leads the Two Moors Pine Marten Project for Devon Wildlife Trust, described their return simply: “These animals were once a key part of our thriving woodland wildlife, so it’s good that they are back where they belong. It’s a positive sign that nature can be restored.”
Four Kits in the Trees
Pine martens are slow breeders. Females generally produce one litter each year, usually containing between one and three kits. Birth takes place during March or April following delayed implantation, a remarkable adaptation that allows mating to occur in summer while ensuring young arrive during the following spring.
Four kits therefore made the Exmoor footage especially encouraging.
Ali North, the project’s Exmoor Field Officer, had spent months monitoring the animals with colleagues and volunteers.
“We were incredibly excited to finally see kits after so many months of intensive monitoring. Mothers give birth in March or April and have on average 2-3 kits, so to see 4 with their mum was an amazing sight and suggests that Exmoor is the perfect home for these animals.”
Successful breeding had already been recorded on Dartmoor in 2025. Further footage there in 2026 shows a mother with two kits, indicating another breeding season. The long-term ambition is for populations from Dartmoor and Exmoor to expand through connected landscapes and eventually meet, helping to create a sustainable pine marten population across the South West.
Ali Hawkins, Senior Ecologist at Exmoor National Park Authority, describes the breeding success as a “hugely encouraging milestone for nature recovery”, recognising the contribution of careful partnership working, monitoring and local communities.
Life Above the Woodland Floor
A pine marten belongs among trees. Around the size of a small domestic cat, it has a long body, a rich brown coat and a distinctive creamy-yellow throat patch known as a bib. Every bib carries a different pattern, allowing conservationists to recognise individuals. Its sharp claws, flexible limbs and ankles capable of rotating through 180 degrees make it remarkably well adapted to moving through the canopy.
Woodland provides shelter, food and places to raise young. Females favour secure cavities high above the ground. Mature trees with suitable hollows are therefore valuable components of pine marten habitat, supplemented in younger woodland by specially designed den boxes.
Their territories can stretch across large areas, drawing them through mixed woodland, scrub and rough grassland as they forage. Their diet changes through the seasons, incorporating voles and other small mammals, invertebrates, fruit, nuts, fungi and occasional birds.
In moving through these habitats, the pine marten becomes part of the woodland’s wider ecological rhythm.
A Predator Restored
Predators have an important role within functioning ecosystems. Natural England notes that diverse predator communities help regulate abundant prey species, while pine martens occur naturally at relatively low densities across large territories.
Their relationship with squirrels is attracting particular interest. Research from Britain and Ireland has associated recovering pine marten populations with reductions in grey squirrel numbers, creating conditions that may support native red squirrels. The Vincent Wildlife Trust continues to emphasise that the precise relationships between the three species remain an active area of research.
Forestry England sees the restoration of natural predator communities as an important part of building healthier forests and has a long-term vision for pine martens to become safely established across England’s woodlands.
Their presence also reminds us what a functioning woodland contains. Trees, fungi, insects, herbivores and predators form relationships accumulated over thousands of years. Restoring a missing native species allows some of those relationships to develop again.
Most people walking on Exmoor will never see a pine marten. They are predominantly nocturnal, naturally shy and highly mobile. Their presence is often revealed through footprints, droppings or the brief glow of eyes on a remote camera. This elusiveness has made citizen science central to their recovery.
The Woodland Growing Whole Again
There is something quietly compelling about four young pine martens appearing on a woodland camera. Their presence carries the work of ecologists, landowners, foresters, volunteers and conservation organisations. It also carries the memory of a species that belonged here long before its disappearance.
Simon Clarke, Head of Nature Recovery at Somerset Wildlife Trust, sees their arrival as a sign that South West woodlands are becoming “better connected and more resilient”, with continued habitat restoration helping pine martens and many other woodland species.
The return of pine martens represents a patient form of nature recovery, built through connected habitats, careful monitoring and generations allowed to establish themselves over time. Somewhere within the wooded folds of Exmoor, four kits are learning to climb, forage and navigate a landscape their species once knew well. The canopy is moving again.
Auria tells this story because the return of pine martens shows how restoring native wildlife can help reconnect living landscapes, ecological relationships and people with the richer woodlands Britain has the capacity to sustain.
From the Auria Foundation
At Auria, we believe the most meaningful conservation stories are often the quietest.
Not those that arrive with dramatic headlines, but those that unfold over decades through patience, partnership and thoughtful stewardship.
The return of breeding Pine Martens to Exmoor, reminds us that restoration is rarely about returning landscapes to some imagined past. More often, it is about creating a future where human volunteering, thriving wildlife and local communities once again find room to exist alongside one another.
Sometimes the greatest success is not that nature returns. It is that, one day, it simply feels as though it never left.
Through our membership model, 50% of every subscription supports carefully selected, high-impact initiatives working to restore ecological integrity, resilience and long-term balance.
We believe meaningful restoration requires awareness, action and patience.
If this article has taken your interest you, perhaps you are already part of that wider conversation.
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