Fishers coming back!

[ImStillMags Mags]

On April 18, 2021, a trail camera in western Chelan County photographed a fisher carrying a kit in her mouth down a tree. It was the first confirmed wild birth of fishers in the North Cascades in roughly half a century.

The fisher was F105, nicknamed Luna by the project team. She had been released west of Darrington, Washington on December 13, 2018 as part of a collaborative restoration effort between the National Park Service, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Conservation Northwest, and the Calgary Zoo. She was one of eighty-nine fishers released into the North Cascades National Park Service Complex and Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest between 2018 and 2020. The goal was not just to put fishers back in the mountains. It was to prove the mountains could still support them.

Fishers were eliminated from Washington by the mid-twentieth century. Overtrapping for their dense, valuable fur and the loss of the old-growth forest structure they depend on for denning and hunting erased them from the state entirely. They were listed as a state endangered species in 1998. The first reintroduction efforts began in 2008 on the Olympic Peninsula, where ninety fishers from British Columbia were released into Olympic National Park. The North Cascades program followed a decade later. By the time Luna's trail camera image was pulled, over 250 fishers had been released across Washington.

A fisher is roughly the size of a house cat. It is a member of the weasel family, related to minks, otters, and wolverines, and it is built for a specific kind of forest. Old-growth and mature second-growth stands with large-diameter trees, broken-top snags, and deep canopy cover. Fishers den in tree cavities. They hunt in the understory and along downed timber. They need structural complexity in the forest the way a trout needs cold water. A young plantation of evenly spaced Douglas fir does not work. A fisher needs the mess and age of a forest that has been left alone long enough to develop the cavities, the fallen logs, and the layered canopy that the animal's entire life cycle depends on.

Luna spent two and a half years in the North Cascades between her release and the trail camera confirmation. During that time, she was a data point on a GPS collar moving through country that biologists hoped was viable but could not confirm until reproduction occurred. A released animal surviving in new habitat proves the habitat can sustain an individual. A released animal breeding in new habitat proves the habitat can sustain a population. That is the line the entire restoration program needed to cross, and Luna crossed it on April 18 when the camera caught her carrying one of four kits in her jaws down a den tree.

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Jeff Lewis called it a wonderful first indication that the North Cascades ecosystem can support a reproductive population of fishers. NPS wildlife biologist Jason Ransom said it was a product of the kind of collaborative conservation needed to steward a healthy ecosystem across boundaries. Dave Werntz of Conservation Northwest, whose organization had been instrumental in the releases, said he was thrilled. It was the first documentation that the fishers were reproducing in the North Cascades.

The cultural dimension of the restoration runs deeper than the biology. Frank Bob, Lummi Nation natural resources policy representative, attended one of the North Cascades fisher releases. He described watching the fisher hesitate to leave its transport cage until Lummi Tribal School students began singing traditional songs and drumming. The fisher came out. Bob said the moment carried weight that went beyond wildlife management. The fisher was part of the landscape before European settlement changed it. Its removal was not just an ecological loss. You cannot take our resources, Bob said, without taking a chip of our cultural identity away with it.

Since Luna's litter, additional fisher reproduction has been confirmed across Washington. Sixty private landowners have signed conservation agreements covering over 3.3 million acres to protect fisher habitat on private land. The species is not recovered. It is still listed as endangered in the state. But the trail camera image of a dark, house-cat-sized carnivore carrying a kit in her teeth through old forest in western Chelan County was the first hard evidence that the fifty-year absence was ending.

Source: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife / National Park Service / Conservation Northwest.

[Lobo]

That's wonderful as far as it goes, but we can't just try to save species, mostly mammals, that appeal to us in some way. Every lifeform made extinct by human activity is a crime and a milestone in our war to destroy our own planet. Moreover, this one is being undermined by the Trump administration reopening old growth forests to logging, drilling, and every other assault imaginable.