A marten is a small wild animal with a long body, short legs, and a long, bushy tail. It is a climber: it lives mainly in trees and hunts smaller animals such as mice, birds, and squirrels. It belongs to the same wider animal group as the weasel and the otter, though it is larger than a weasel and more at home in the woods. People also used to hunt martens for their soft fur, so older writing may talk about marten skins as much as about the living animal. You will meet the word in nature books and zoo signs, not in everyday city talk. In Britain the kind people mean is often the pine marten, a woodland animal that has been coming back in some places. Though actually, the word is easy to mix with two others that only sound like it: martin, a small bird, and Martin, a man's name. Those are different words.