Fishers, omnivorous members of the weasel family, were completely eliminated from Pennsylvania during unregulated hunting and massive deforestation in the late 1800s.
At the time, the last recorded Pennsylvania fishers were spotted in places such as Clearfield, Elk, Cameron, Potter and Sullivan counties.
In the mid-1990s, encouraged by similar efforts in New York and West Virginia, the Pennsylvania Game Commission along with the Wild Resource Conservation Fund, National Wild Turkey Federation, Audubon Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Trappers Association and Penn State and Frostburg State universities, began reintroducing fishers.
Nearly 190 fishers, trapped in New Hampshire, were released at six sites in north central Pennsylvania.
The closest site to the Pittsburgh area was a couple hours away in the Allegheny National Forest.
By 2006, researchers involved with the project reported seeing fishers moving into the Laurel Highlands, and along the border between Indiana and Cambria counties.
That didn’t stop Bill Powers of Murrysville from being shocked when one of several wildlife cameras he set up on his Westmoreland County property snapped a photo of a fisher this summer.
“I put the camera on an old fallen log in a remote area and kept it there several months,” said Powers, who founded PixController and PixCams, providing livestreaming video feeds, including bald eagle nests in Hays and West Mifflin. “I pulled the SD card this week and to my amazement it captured a photo of a fisher in mid-June.”
Powers estimated the fisher was about 3 feet long.
“It’s super rare to see one in this area,” he said. “Kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Fishers are a generalist predator, capable of eating everything from mice, voles and squirrels to eggs and small birds. They do not eat fish, as their name might suggest. They also are one of the few animals capable of killing and eating porcupines.
Subsequent research seems to show the fisher population in Pennsylvania is doing well.
A state game commission study of fisher diets, performed between 2002 and 2014, collected 91 fisher carcasses from 30 Pennsylvania counties. Between studies, reports of fishers struck by cars and incidental trapping reports, state game officials believe there are stable and increasing fisher populations in southwest and eastern Westmoreland County, and a stable population on the eastern side of Armstrong County.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
Martens too?
Pennsylvania Game Commission officials have been working on a plan since 2022 to reintroduce another member of the weasel family, the American pine marten, back into the state's forests.
It disappeared from the Keystone State more than a century ago.
However commission members voted 6-3 in early 2024 to table a 10-year strategic plan on reestablishing the marten population in order to solicit more feedback from the public and the hunting community.