One pine day

The pine marten may have a taste for jam sandwiches, but its razor-sharp claws and appetite for eggs and grey squirrels makes it a predatory force to be reckoned with

- says Patrick Galbraith

FOR my 18th birthday I received, wrapped in a piece of purple tissue paper, a piece of roadkill that had been scavenged from the side of the A9 just north of Beauly. It came, as all taxidermied pine martens must, with a certificate to confirm that it had died in unfortunate circumstances (in this instance when hurrying across an accident blackspot). Pine martens are a protected species and to kill one deliberately can result in up to six months in prison. That said, the greatest penalty that has yet been passed down was in 2023, when a 54-year-old man was hit with a £9,700 fine, part of which was for a pine marten-trapping offence.

My pine marten, the road traffic-accident victim, had been fashioned into a sporran by Kate Macpherson, who has been at it for decades in Inverness-shire. She currently has —which may be of interest for those of you who wear kilts—fox, mink and red squirrel sporrans for sale. It's worth noting that she is keen to stress that if she didn't scrape these creatures up off the roads, their corpses would simply be 'thrown in a ditch'. 'They would be wasted. Nobody would ever get to see the beauty of these animals, so it's simply a way of preserving them,' she reasons.

At this current moment in time, my pine-marten sporran is nowhere to be found. I last recall having it, quite some years ago, when dancing an eightsome at the Aboyne Ball— do note that, if you're up that way, it has 'PG' embossed on the back and there is a substantial reward—of a year's supply of muntjac pies—for its recovery.