Welcome, friend of the taiga
You have found The Sable Den. This is a page about the sable — Martes zibellina, a marten of the dense coniferous forests running from the Urals through Siberia to Hokkaido. I have never seen one alive, and I probably never will. This page is built out of other people's fieldwork: naturalists' notes, old fur auction catalogues, and a shelf of interlibrary loans.
That is not a confession, it is the point. A shrine to something you cannot walk out and meet is a different kind of page than a field guide, and I think it is the more honest kind for an animal whose entire modern reputation was built the same way — by people who never saw the forest either, only the coat that came out of it.
“Everyone has heard of sable. Almost no one who has heard of it has seen the animal do anything except be a coat.”
There are six pages here. The Subspecies is the heart of it: the regional forms fur traders learned to tell apart long before zoologists agreed on how many there really are. Why the Sable is the argument, for anyone who arrived here thinking this is a page about fashion. Field Notes is the log of what I have actually read, dated and unedited. Guestbook is where you say hello, and Links is where you leave for somewhere better.
How to tell a sable from a pine marten
You almost certainly will not need this in the field — that is rather the theme of this page — but it is worth knowing, because the two are close enough to hybridise where their ranges meet. Look at the head first: the sable's is more elongated, and the ears sit longer and more pointed than a pine marten's. Then the coat: sable fur is softer and silkier, described by people who have handled both as simply nicer to touch, which is exactly the property three centuries of fur traders cared about and zoologists mostly do not.
Where the two do meet and interbreed, the offspring has its own name: a kidus, intermediate in colour and size, and sterile. Nobody farms for kidus on purpose; they turn up, get noted, and the record keeps a small permanent column for them.
NEW! The subspecies table now includes the Kamchatka form. More as the interlibrary loans come in.