You might be right, and I might have been "theorising" too much, with too much "in principle", I admit that...
... they (temporarily but still) stay in a chosen territory and maintain it.
I would rather say, they RETURN to that chosen territory, regularly. (When hunting around, they are great wanderers
indeed - no question about that, I hope.) And they probably really
defend it only at the mating time, when it becomes
the most important thing in life...
I don't presume to be a specialist on that at all, so, if anyone knows more, let him/her have his/her say.
An aside: Malpolons do scent-mark "all over the place", but a "territory" as such, for any "territorial" animal, is not alwas
scent-marked, or marked in any way at all. It might just be a space around it, not marked by anything, which it chooses
to "defend". That's the "theoretical", the most general definition of the technical term "territory" (in biology, of course.)
If a particular species does more than that, I'd really like to know. Malpolon first. So,
what precisely do they scent-mark?
All the time, or just when it becomes terribly important to them? And alike questions...