Bringing back a native forest carnivore

For the last several years, Conservation Northwest has worked with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Olympic National Park to bring back the fisher. It's an example of a successful and innovative partnership of public and private efforts to protect and preserve Washington's native wildlife.

In early 2008, fishers were returned home to their habitat in Washington State for the first time in over eighty years. Eighteen fishers have now been released into the Olympic National Park. Over the next three years, approximately 100 fishers will be released here. An earlier study had concluded that the forests on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula was the best place to reintroduce this important and intelligent forest carnivore.

Read press coverage of fisher reintroduction

Watch a slideshow of images from fisher release in Olympic National Park

Fur and forest

Pacific fishers are the second largest North American terrestrial mustelid, after wolverine. With fur more luxurious than mink, fisher were much sought after by trappers, and this forest mammal, about the size of a house cat, was hunted out of Washington's forests by the 1930s. Extensive logging of Northwest old growth spelled loss of their favored habitat, forests of large trees, snags, and logs.

Fisher facts

• Like most others in the weasel family, fishers (Martes pennanti) are curious and intelligent.
• Solitary and strong hunters, fishers are the only forest carnivore known to hunt porcupine with regular success, which is no small feat.
• Even in areas with relative fisher abundance, fishers are extremely secretive and rarely seen by humans.
• They like older forests with high canopy cover, and mature and old-growth stands. They rest, nest, and take cover in downed logs and the "witch's brooms" of tree branches.

What's in a name?

Belying its name, the fisher is a creature of the forest not oceans, and one of its favorite foods is porcupine, not fish. The name is thought to come from the French word fichet, the name for the pelt of a European polecat. It may also have originated from trappers who used fish as bait to catch fishers. Where they haven't been overhunted and lost from the landscape, fishers range across North America and their local names are many, including black cat, fisher cat, pekan, pequam, wejack, and woods-otter.