More on Fishers and Their Return to New Jersey

 

Fisher photo by Josh More via Flickr Creative Commons

The Wild New Jersey website has excerpts from David Wheeler’s 2011 book Wild New Jersey: Nature Adventures in the Garden State. One post is about a rare predator who has returned to New Jersey.

The excerpt is from a chapter about Charlie Kontos who was researching species who had once lived in New Jersey and were assumed to be gone (extirpated). They would include elk, fisher, and martens. Certainly, they are no elk wandering our woods, but Kontos thought that perhaps fishers or martens might still be here or might have returned since some of the forests had come back.

"Beaver, otter, black bear, and bobcat had returned to numbers near their previous levels. We need to reintroduce some of the other species we removed so long ago, Kontos thought. Cougars were fascinating – yet the public probably wasn’t ready to reintroduce such a top predator. But fishers? His academic advisors told him it could never happen. Like nature’s Don Quixote, Kontos was tilting at wildlife windmills.

But something told Kontos differently. The fisher – a tree-climbing, wolverine-like predator larger than a woodchuck – is most commonly found in the Adirondacks and Canada. Kontos felt certain it was already back in New Jersey. People just didn’t realize it yet.

He set up his first motion-trigger cameras in the remote wilds of northwestern New Jersey. The first six months produced not a single image of a fisher. Kontos was nearly ready to give up the dream when he uploaded the latest photo stills onto his laptop one morning. There it was – a clear, unambiguous photo. The fisher was back in New Jersey."

More at conservewildlifenj.org/blog/