The hunt for sable fur helped push Russia all the way across Siberia
A small Siberian marten with fur that feels smooth whichever way you stroke it drove kings, khans and tsars to extravagance. One Russian diplomat compared it to the Golden Fleece, Henry VIII limited it to top nobles, and the chase for sable pelts helped spur Russia's conquest of Siberia.
The sable lives in dense spruce, pine, larch and birch forests from the Urals across Siberia to northern Mongolia, Hokkaido and Korea. It weighs under two kilograms, dens among tree roots near riverbanks, and hunts mostly at dusk by sound and smell. Its menu shifts with the seasons, from hares and small mammals to berries, birds and even fish caught with its front paws. It scrapes slime off slugs before eating them and sometimes trails wolves and bears to scavenge their kills.
Its breeding has an odd delay. Sables mate in summer, but the fertilised embryo floats unattached for about eight months before implanting, so a pregnancy of up to 298 days contains only about a month of real development. Where sables meet pine martens in the Urals they sometimes interbreed, producing a usually sterile hybrid called a kidus.
The fur's fame is ancient. In the Secret History of the Mongols, Genghis Khan's mother received a sable coat when he married, and a boy found in a ruined camp was recognised as noble by his sable-lined jerkin. Ivan the Terrible demanded 30,000 pelts a year from the conquered Kazan Tatars, though never more than a thousand arrived. The black, white-tipped sables of Barguzin on Lake Baikal were so prized that the Russian Empire's first nature reserve was created there in 1916 to protect them.
Heavy hunting drove numbers down until a five-year ban in 1935, and between 1940 and 1965 some 19,000 animals were released to repopulate Russia. Today the species is listed as least concern. One surprise for artists: the kolinsky sable brushes prized for watercolour are really made from Siberian weasel hair.
Source: Sable
