The fortunes of fishers: on the wane in the West, the weasel's numbers are waxing in the East

The southern Sierra fishers once enjoyed these fatty packages. Porcupines, however, have another enemy: the timber industry. In winter, porcupines eat the inner bark of trees and can damage or deform them. Barrett reports there were widespread programs to eradicate porcupines in the southern Sierra. He has spoken with people who worked for the National Forest Service and the timber industry in the 1950s and 60s, putting out salt blocks laced with strychnine. The poisoning has stopped, but the porcupines apparently have not returned.

Fishers, in contrast, have elsewhere been popular with the timber industry and were reintroduced in several places in the United States and Canada in an effort to reduce porcupine numbers. In some areas, the plan did seem to work. Since the 1970s, Barrett has pushed for fishers to be transplanted into California's central Sierra mountains to restore the connection between the state's northern and southern populations, but in this case, he finds no support from the timber industry. "Now that there's talk of listing," he says, "they'd like the fisher to disappear."

Back East the comeback of fishers makes it likely that Sally Beckwith will continue to spend her summers acting as surrogate mother to fisher orphans. Since she allows her charges no other contact with humans, she has her hands full. The young ones love to play a game in which she tosses them 8 to 10 feet toward a tree, where they catch hold, then run back down for more. To give them practice catching prey, she swings a towel from her arm, and they attack it with a full tackle and bite. She uses eye contact and her voice to enforce strict limits on their behavior, as they would love to leap on her from a tree or tackle her legs and climb. She feeds them with care. Like other mustelids, fishers have a high metabolic rate and are ravenous eaters. "I have learned," she says, "never to get between any mustelid and its food."

Each animal has a personality. One summer she raised a male who was "a lummox, a slow-going, easy guy," and a female who was "like a coiled spring, an elastic band ready to fire." When the two played, the female dominated: if it was tag, he was always struggling after her; if it was an ambush, she was always the ambusher. Like all her young fishers, when awake, they were always on the move, and when asleep, the animals wouldn't wake even if you picked up a body part and dropped it. A cage in the woods serves as a den, and at first, Beckwith stays with her charges when they are out of their cage. As they get older, she leaves the door open. A day comes when they stay away overnight and are waiting for her in the morning, starving. Within days they learn to fend for themselves, faster than any other carnivores she has raised. They'll stay away two nights, then a week, then they are gone.

Beckwith spends her winters thinking about what they're doing, where they are. She muses, "I'd love to travel with a fisher."

Like most people, though, she has never seen one in the wild.