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`Extinct' animal pops up in Siskiyou Wilderness The marten An animal believed trapped to extinction half a century ago has popped up in the remote Siskiyou Wilderness just south of the Oregon state line. Humboldt martens, animals prized for their luxurious, golden-brown fur, have been found in the Siskiyou Wilderness on the southern tip of the Siskiyou National Forest. Bill Zielinski, a wildlife ecologist for the U.S Forest Service's Redwoods Science Lab in Arcata, Calif., was looking for fishers, a cousin of the squirrel-sized marten, when he made the discovery. "We were not seeking martens because we thought there weren't any martens," he said. "As the environmental concern for wildlife species grew out of the '60s and '70s, this subspecies was already seen as gone," he added. "It has generated considerable interest around here." Zielinski, who says he has documented as many as 30 Humboldt martens since his 1996 discovery, went public with his findings this month at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in Eureka, hoping to get help to search more widely for the animals. The bulk of the 153,000-acre Siskiyou Wilderness is in the Six Rivers and the Klamath forests in far Northern California. The Humboldt marten is considered a subspecies of the American marten, sometimes known as the American sable or pine marten, which is found throughout much of North America. While pine martens have been found in the Cascade Mountain range in Southern Oregon, no Humboldt martens have been found in the area, according to wildlife biologists for the Rogue River and Siskiyou national forests. Humboldt martens may range into Southern Oregon but no in-depth research has been completed on them, biologists said. Martens are shy, arboreal weasel-like mammals. "Pine martens are around -- you just don't see them very often," said Lee Webb, forest wildlife biologist for the Siskiyou forest. Zielinski feels confident the animals he has tracked are members of the Humboldt subspecies of the American marten because of their tracks, skull and ear size and fur markings. But he cautioned that definitive genetic testing has not been completed. Frank Bayliss, a researcher at the San Francisco State University conservation genetics laboratory, has been comparing frozen scat from the animals Zielinski spotted to the only known specimens of the Humboldt marten -- six skins in the museum collection at the University of California, Berkeley. "I know what I'd like to see and I have a lot of data starting to gel ... but I haven't anything that I can say that would be definitive," said Bayliss, who expects to have an answer by June. Humboldt martens were common in Redwood forests throughout the early 1900s, Zielinski said. Trappers reported getting as many as 30 in one winter, he said. It was legal to trap martens in Northern California until 1948. Other species of martens may still be legally trapped in Oregon and Washington. Since announcing his discovery, Zielinski has heard of more marten sightings. "It's been really fun to listen to the stories and use that as a basis for planning our searches in the future," he said. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA