Albany's Urban Weasels
By ROLAND KAYS
This winter I'm on the track of an urban weasel in Albany — the fisher. These six-to-13-pound members of the weasel family started moving into urban areas 10 years ago, and have been quietly hunting their squirrel and rabbit dinners here ever since.

Unfortunately, all is not well on the Western front — fisher populations in California, Oregon and Washington are fragile despite an ongoing trapping ban there. The contrast between Eastern and Western fishers could not have been more stark than in 2000, when conservation groups sued to have the Western fisher listed as an endangered species, and we got our first camera-trap photograph of an Eastern fisher moving through suburban Albany. In a century the Northeastern fisher had gone from wilderness animal to suburban predator, while its cousins in California struggled to maintain their populations even in wild forests.

Given the continued trouble faced by Western fishers, the question of how Eastern fishers have successfully adapted was timely. This is the topic of my fieldwork this winter, teaming with my graduate student, Scott LaPoint. Scott is from Argyle, N.Y., with undergraduate and master's work at Paul Smith's College and the SUNY College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry, respectively. After a stint working for another fisher research project in California, he came back to New York to conduct his Ph.D. field research, earning his degree through the prestigious Max Planck Institute at the University of Konstanz, Germany (academic life can be convoluted).
Our approach is to document the ecology and behavior of fishers living in the urban forests of the Capital District, a triangle of suburban development with Albany, Schenec

Scott LaPoint An aerial photograph of the wild study site in upstate New York.
You can't exactly go out to your backyard and watch fisher behavior. They do their best to avoid people, coming out at night and moving quickly and quietly through the forest. Furthermore, your presence would change their behavior, and also alert the prey they are trying to sneak up on. Over the next few weeks Scott and I will be opening the biologist's toolbox wide to peer into their lives without affecting their behavior. We are deploying small GPS tracking collars to see exactly where the animals go, and tiny three-axis accelerometers to characterize their behavior. We use motion-sensitive camera traps to document their prey populations and monitor key movement corridors. Finally, we follow their tracks in the snow to see for ourselves what they did the night before, what and how they hunt, where they sleep, and with whom. The fieldwork is challenging, but gives us a well-rounded view on how this weasel has adapted to urban forests.
No comments:
Post a Comment