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Fishers used to occur throughout all of North America
throughout boreal and temperate forests. They were trapped to extinction
in a lot of their range. Around 1998 Washington State started the process of
doing a status review looking at what is going on with the Fisher population and
they concluded that they warranted listing on the state endangered species list
And probably the only way to recover them in the state was
through reintroduction. So that started this ten-year compliance journey
where our partners came in
did environmental assessment to figure out, Can they come back? and if so, "Where?"
and What would be the impacts?
and it all kind of coalesced that the best habitat
to bring back Fishers to Washington State was here in Olympic National Park.
We released our first animals in
January 2008 and we released the last animal in
February 2010. We released a total of 90 over three years.
So this is the ground method we use for tracking
Fishers. We put a radio collar on and then when we bring down we have we have
finding out where they go. The strongest signal you get is right off the end of
this.
Then as you get off to the sides it will die out
you won't get as loud of a signal. So you more or less walk along as a directional thing and
wherever it's strongest, you go in that direction.
So when she first started denning at that site we were pretty concerned
because it's not typical Fisher denning habitat. It's way too open.
And especially when we'd go in and check the den site we'd see coyotes which are
known Fisher predators.
And then looking at the film on the automatic camera you could see where a bobcat had
visited the site. So that we are pretty nervous about it. So we went looking for her
Just driving around that area listening for her radio signal. And we
did pick her up about half an hour later on "mortality mode" so
immediately, we knew that she had a den.
We knew that she had been there within three days and we thought maybe these kits are still alive.
We got ahold of Scott Horton
of the DNR. He climbed the tree we weren't sure if there were even kits left
originally
and as Scott was climbing there's a big piece of loose bark
that he pulled off and one of the kits gave this loud
scream at him and we knew there was at least one
But we still didn't know what cavity. Finally at some point
another little piece of cavity broke off and they popped out and there were two
kits there that we could see. Our plan is to release them in October.
Northwest Trek which is a game park near Mount Rainier
they graciously agreed to raise them for us with minimal human contact
because it is our goal to reintroduce them into the wild.
Even though their mom "F-88" didn't make it
she had unique genotypes these kits have genes
not only from her but also their father who is up in BC so it's critical
to try to make the effort to get those genes back in the population with
these two males.
Because we're getting such
outreach in the paper it's just really been fun. This project has brought a lot of
people together all working together on it and it's been
really rewarding. Not just restoring the ecosystem by bringing this animal back but
also bringing all these people together
working on a common goal.