Our good friend Roland Kays who is the Curator of mammals at the New York State Museum embarking on an exciting study in and around Albany, NY to determine how Fishers in the East are thriving both in rural and urban environs..................while Fishers in the Western States are endangered.....................Way to go Roland......Great stuff!

Albany's Urban Weasels

By ROLAND KAYS

Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, writes from Albany,  where he is comparing the behavior of fishers in urban and wild settings.

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.

Roland Kays Scott LaPoint holding a tranquilized male fisher with a tracking collar.

The story of the fisher in the Northeast United States is one of resilience and recovery. They have gone from near extinction at the peak of the fur trade to a burgeoning modern population that has recovered most of its historic range in New England, and is now pushing south along the Appalachian Mountains. Initially biologists considered fishers to be strict "wilderness animals," partly because they survived the 19th-century trapper's zeal only by hiding in the most remote areas. Recovery began with a 1930s trapping ban, but continued even after trapping seasons were reopened in the Northeast a few decades later. By the 1980s fishers were found in a variety of forested areas, not just wilderness. With carefully managed trapping seasons, Northeast fishers expanded their populations in all directions.
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.

Scott LaPoint The urban study site has four times the density of roads and 15 times the population density of the wild site.

How have Eastern fishers done it? Certainly the regrowth of Eastern forests over the last century has helped provide better habitat, but for these "wilderness animals" to move into urban areas there must also be some change in their behavior. Compared with the typical evolutionary time scale, humans cause such rapid change to environments that species are challenged to adapt. Those that don't adapt go extinct. The wrath of saws and guns in the Northeast in the late 1800s extirpated species like wolves, cougars and elk, and brought others, like beavers, martens, and fishers, to the brink. Even turkeys, deer and raccoons were hit hard by human persecution at this time. But the conservation and game management movements arose and gave surviving species a chance to recover and time to adapt.
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, Schenectady and Troy, N.Y., as its points. In particular, we want to see how the animals move through and connect the small forest fragments, avoiding speeding cars and still finding enough food. We will then contrast this with what we find in a population of "wild" fishers living about 20 miles away in the forests around Grafton Lakes State Park and Pittstown State Forest.

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.