Fishers make comeback in Pa.

Everybody Adventures | Bob Frye
Friday, Feb. 10, 2006 12:00 a.m. | Friday, Feb. 10, 2006 12:00 a.m.

As stories go, the one about the return of fishers to Pennsylvania's woods is working out to be a pretty good one, it seems.

Fishers -- large, cat-like members of the weasel family -- seem to be doing relatively well here today, though a study set to begin this spring will attempt to answer that question for sure.

Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Game Commission will be trapping and radio collaring fishers in Allegheny National Forest this year and next, and in the Laurel Highlands in 2007 and 2008, to figure out just how many might live in the state.

"That's really the bottom line to this, to get some population estimates," said Matt Lovallo, furbearer biologist for the Game Commission.

Fishers were once native to the Keystone State. They had disappeared by the early 20th century, though, as wide-spread timber cuts destroyed most of their habitat.

Things began to change in 1994. That's when the Wild Resource Conservation Fund, with support from a variety of partners, including the Game Commission, Allegheny National Forest, National Wild Turkey Federation, Audubon Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Trappers Association, and Penn State and Frostburg State universities, began reintroducing fishers to the state.

Over five years, researchers transplanted 190 fishers from New Hampshire and New York to Pennsylvania's northern tier. That made it the largest fisher reintroduction project ever undertaken in North America.

About half of those animals were female, and most of those were pregnant when released, too, meaning that the total number of fishers in the woods was even higher.

The goal of the project from the beginning was "simply to reintroduce a part of Pennsylvania's natural heritage to this state," said Tom Serfass, an associate professor of biology at Frostburg State and the man who directed the fisher reintroduction effort.

Indications are that the program has succeeded, at least in relative terms, Serfass said.

"These are animals that are very territorial, so you're not going to have a lot of overlap in the home ranges of females and females and males and males," Serfass said. "They're not like raccoons, where you're going to have a lot of animals in a single area. They're a low density animal."

Still, they seem to be expanding. The fishers that have moved into the Laurel Highlands -- with the Cambria/Indiana county border a seeming hot spot -- are a separate population, for example, that likely expanded here on their own from Maryland and West Virginia.

As for the study set to begin, researchers will put radio collars on 12 to 20 female fishers in Allegheny National Forest to start, said Jeff Larkin, an associate professor of conservation biology at IUP who is coordinating the study. That should allow researchers to get detailed information on the size of a fisher's home range, Larkin said.

They'll be using "hair traps," live traps equipped with a brush similar to a livestock comb to collect hairs, to catch animals, which should allow them to examine each animal's DNA, too.

All that information together should allow biologists to start estimating just where fishers are living and how many of them are out there, Larkin said.

"We should be able to give the Game Commission a real solid minimum number," he said. "We should end up with a really reliable estimate of population sizes and densities."

Lovallo said it's unlikely that this study will show it's time to institute a hunting or trapping season on fishers just yet, though that's the ultimate goal. But he's expecting big things of Pennsylvania's fishers.

"They are really going to take off," Lovallo said. "It may be five years, it may be 10 years, but at some point they are going to become much more common to see in Pennsylvania."

"I think it's a great story," added Serfass. "I think we need to be cautiously optimistic about the way things are going."

Fishers are a generalist predator, capable of eating everything from mice, voles and squirrels to eggs and small birds. They do not eat fish, as their name might suggest. They also are one of the few animals capable of killing and eating porcupines.

Pennsylvania has that kind of prey in abundance, along with the kind of mature woods that fishers prefer, so Larkin expects they are doing well here.

"Certainly, if you look at the chronology of landscape change in Pennsylvania, we're definitely moving toward a landscape that's more favorable to forest species, like the fisher," he said.

The Game Commission collects 20 to 30 road-killed fishers across the state each year, Lovallo said. Incidental captures by trappers are relatively frequent, and public sightings reported to conservation officers are increasing all the time, from just over 100 in 2002-03 to more than 300 in 2004-05, he said.

Female fishers weigh about eight to 10 pounds, on average. Males can get as big as 15 pounds. They are sometimes called "tree foxes" or black cats."

Article by Bob Frye,
Everybody Adventures, http://www.everybodyadventures.com

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