IF you go down to the woods today, you can dig the dirt on the recently reintroduced pine marten – thanks to a ‘who’s who of poo’ guide on how to spot their ‘sweet smelling’ droppings.

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust’s pine marten project officer Dr Josie Bridges has lifted the lid on identifying evidence of the secretive mammal through spotting their faeces or ‘scats’.

Her blog, which includes a lighthearted “warning… may contain traces of poo”, includes advice on how to distinguish the marten’s droppings, which have been compared in smell to “Parma violets or Lapsang Souchong tea”, from stinky fox mess.

She says: “Marten poo, like that of many carnivores, is known as scat and is one of the easiest ways to know that you have martens in town

“By laying scats throughout their territory, they can clearly mark it to any passing martens that this seat is taken.

“Their strong-smelling anal secretions can give a clear message to other martens about their sex, condition and reproductive state.”

Dr Bridges adds: “Marten scat is very distinctive and, if you know what you’re looking for, is easy to tell apart from other mammals in the area.

“They are a dark, coiled, continuous squiggle that is generally 10-13 mm wide and 80-120mm long… (and) very mucousy scat.

“The most freshly deposited scats are known as ‘Moist Classics’ and are dark, long, slim and slimy and tend to contain lots of small mammal remains.

“If a marten has been eating lots of eggs the scats become much lighter and softer, while a late summer scat will be filled with berries and can look lumpy and purple, and, of course, anywhere where people are baiting to encourage the martens, their scats are often filled with peanut pieces.”

Fox scat is similar to look at , but the “not-unpleasant’ sweet-musky smell from a fresh marten scat is unmistakable… (and) should not make you gag,” she adds, unlike “the acrid stink of fox scat… all too familiar to dog owners.”

But dog owners out for a walk in the woods can use their pets to find marten scat as it is “such a novel scent that is unique and causes most dogs to get very excited”.

“So take a peek where your pooch is perusing, you never know what they might have found!” she adds.

She admits that scientists like her “have a bit of a reputation for our obsession with poo”.

“But it’s hard not to get excited by the fresh glisten of a recently dropped scat that shows your target species has passed by recently,” she says.

“Martens, like most mammals, are rarely seen and it is nigh on impossible to survey the population by sightings alone.

“But pine martens, despite being a shy, elusive, and cryptic creature, are actually real exhibitionists about their scat.

“They don’t build latrines like badgers and polecats but instead like to deposit it in prominent places; tree stumps, the top of den boxes, and in the middle of footpaths and tracks.

“This brazen pooing is very handy to us scientists as it makes surveying for martens very simple! In pairs we walk transects along short sections of forest track throughout the area and examine any scat we come across.

“It’s rare to find anything but fox, marten, or dog on the forest tracks, but working in the Dean has yielded lots of exciting boar droppings scattered across the tracks too.”

Dr Bridges says “building a scatalogue” record of droppings “helps build a fuller picture of how our martens are expanding and using the landscape.”

Eighteen pine martens - one of Britain’s rarest mammals - were secretly reintroduced to the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley 11 months ago after an absence of more than a century.

The initiative was the first formal reintroduction of the protected mammal In England, which was almost hunted to extinction in the UK.

The 18 pine martens were translocated from Scotland, the mammal’s last stronghold, and thanks to around-the-clock radio tracking and trail camera monitoring, the team now know that several females have had kits

To see more information about pine martens and spotting their droppings, go to www.gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk