As newly-released fishers roam the North Cascades this winter, National Park Service officials take stock and prepare for the next steps to study their reintroduction.
Fishers, a carnivorous mammal in the weasel family, originally vanished from the state by the mid-1900s due to habitat loss and overharvesting by fur trappers.
Over the course of the past seven years, federal, state and partner agencies worked to release fishers and study them aerially as part of their reintroduction.
Scott Schuyler, a member of the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe and director of the tribe’s natural resources department, said he was very pleased to see the release of the fishers accomplished.
“We don’t want to see them removed again,” he said. “The ecosystem isn’t complete without (all of) the creatures.”
That first stage of fisher reintroduction in the North Cascades concluded this past summer with the publication of a National Park Service report documenting its successes.
The report shows the reintroduction project hit all of its main goals, which were releasing at least 80 fishers into both the North and South Cascades, showing that at least 50% of the fishers survived through the first breeding season, and documenting reproduction.
Jason Ransom, wildlife biologist with the North Cascades National Park Service Complex, said that while project leaders won’t know how well the reintroduction went until they know that several generations have passed, “we’re certainly cautiously optimistic that it was successful.”
“As far as we know, they’re out there doing what they should be,” Ransom said.
Next, project managers will set up a grid of 150 cameras and hair snag stations to catch fisher hair in the North Cascades. In the summer and fall, biologists will check the stations to get a sense of where fishers are on the landscape.
The hair captured as fishers run by the stations will allow biologists to assess their genetics.
“We’ll genotype that (hair) and see if we get a match. And so we’ll know that someone actually survived that was a founder. Probably more exciting is we’ll know if that’s an offspring,” Ransom said. “So we sort of get the family tree.”
Schuyler said that the Upper Skagit tribe is excited about what the future holds for fishers.
"We look forward to the days of a self-sustaining population," he said.
