For Intel on This Rare Carnivore, See the Hoopa Valley Tribe – Mother Jones

A captured fisher is released after examination, part of the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s longstanding efforts to monitor the culturally important species.Elizabeth Miller/Undark

This story was originally published in Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a sunny November morning, Anthony Colegrove parked his work truck on the side of a road in northern California’s Klamath Mountains and began creating a mobile laboratory. He pulled down the truck’s tailgate, popped open a tackle box filled with syringes and other supplies, and pulled out a clipboard. A weasel-like animal called the fisher waited nearby, making glottal sounds in a wire trap.

Colegrove is a field technician with the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s wildlife division. Colegrove and Holly Horan, a colleague, coaxed the fisherman out of the trap to a metal cone which restrained it while Colegrove administered sedatives to its rump. “She’s out,” Colegrove said, watching the fisher slump.

Colegrove and Horan then began an exhaustive examination of the sedated mammal. Colegrove also took photographs of each tuft of pale fur and added cream to a coffee and cinnamon pelt.

As evidenced by the microchip embedded under her skin, the young fisher had been previously trapped. Colegrove and Horan will add to a larger data set, providing insights into the lives of the one fisherman and the larger community of fishers in Hoopa and beyond. “When we do do stuff, we go above and beyond what everybody else is doing,” Colegrove said.

Tribal wildlife technicians have been collecting and studying fishers ever since 2005. This allows them to keep an eye on rare and culturally significant species. As a result, the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s wildlife division maintains some of the longest and most detailed documentation of fishers in North America. Their data have helped to characterize fisher behaviour, helped to estimate their population size, and revealed potential problems for forests and other wildlife. The tribe’s work illustrates how Indigenous-led science can support conservation efforts at a time when Congress is considering increasing its funding for tribes to conduct wildlife research.

The region’s fisherman can grow up to three feet long and weigh as much as 12 pounds. They are agile enough to spring from tree to tree—and to flip porcupines onto their backs, exposing the soft bellies for attack. Fisher numbers have declined in the majority of their historical range in the north United States after extensive fur-trapping, logging and other activities.

“They need these big trees, particularly to get up off the forest floor to escape predators, to consume prey,” explained Sean Matthews, who worked with the Hoopa Valley Tribe from 2004 to 2008 and continues to study fishers at Oregon State University. Matthews stated that fishers also use trees to keep warm on cold winter days. “You’ll see them sprawled out on a limb somewhere, just sunbathing.”

The Hoopa Valley Tribe, which was part of the aforementioned a, became one of the first self governing tribes in 1988. Policy shift that allows tribes to retake control from the federal government of the programs that serve their citizens and manage resources on tribal lands. More than 370 tribes have since assumed control of programs overseeing education, health care, transportation, and economic activity—a shift generally seen as better meeting the needs and priorities of tribal members.

The tribe was now responsible for monitoring the timber industry over 140 miles of land. The tribal Forestry Department employed Mark Higley, a wildlife scientist, to help develop a forest management program and monitor for spotted owls. These birds had recently been added to the Endangered Species List which requires loggers not to go around them. Soon, Higley saw that fishers were also potentially threatened and culturally significant, so he brought this to the tribal leaders’ attention and began tracking these animals, too.

Tribal members preserve ancestral villages of cedar-plank houses, also known as xonta In the Hupa language, they visit fishers along the Trinity River for ceremonies and dances. In traditional regalia, a fisher’s fur drapes over a shoulder and the animals’ long, narrow pelts serve as arrow quivers. Colegrove, a tribal member will celebrate the birth of his child this summer with a dance where a fisherman is called upon to chase away evil energies. He’s cautious about how much detail he shares publicly, but says tribal elders have long told him fishers are powerful.

When the Hupa began managing their own forests, the tribe reduced the amount of acreage that could be clear-cut at a given time. Each logging project had a maximum of 10 acres. Loggers were required not to remove large trees from clusters. The available science at the time suggested that fishers could only survive within old growth forests. Higley brought this to the tribe’s attention and was asked to monitor whether a local fisher population might be able to live among the remaining stands.

It turns out that the answer is yes. Last November, the wildlife biologist stood in an area where the Hupa had logged it shortly before he took over. He pulled up a GPS map from his phone, which showed the locations of nearby den sites. Fishers are attracted to mature tan oaks that have rotten cavities in their trunks, just big enough for a female of the species, he explained.

Higley has used many different methods over the years, including some that were completely new. For example, Higley invited a biologist at nearby Humboldt State University to come to the Hoopa Valley and record fisher prints using “track plates,” a monitoring strategy in which animals walk into a box, stepping first through soot, then onto an adhesive surface that records their footprints. Higley’s office still holds boxes of papers with the five-pad imprint amid dark scattershot loose soot.

With males roughly twice as big as females, researchers could often tell a male from a female track, but not much more than that—and both Higley and the professor wanted more detail. So they began to ear-tag fishers and set up cameras with track plates. Sometimes, they photographed the mammals with their teeth wrapped around some bait. The research that followed asked a series census-esque questions about fishers. How long have you been fishing? How many children are you responsible for? Is dad still around?

These questions can be answered with detailed physical reviews like those by Colegrove and Horan. (It doesn’t hurt that some fishers are “trap-happy”—prone to falling for bait and getting captured—a characteristic that allows the tribal Forestry Department to monitor these individuals over several years.) Wildlife staff have used radio collars to track fisherman’s movements, and staff have climbed trees to locate microchip kits.

Researchers were able to calculate how far fishers had traveled since their birth when the microchipped kit were captured as adults. That data showed females tended to set up what’s called a home range adjacent to or overlapping with their mother’s, while males left their mother’s territory almost as soon as they became independent.

This research points to a dilemma for fishers’ recovery. Fishers won’t recolonize their former territory unless their current range becomes so crowded that females feel compelled to spread out from their mothers in search of resources. Absent this crowding, Higley said, “the males are going to run out into Timbuktu” and then not find any mates. It’s entirely possible that many stretches of the Pacific Northwest long emptied of fishers could now support the mammals, but it could be a long time before any fishers are prompted to move there. (Wildlife managers outside of the Hoopa Valley sometimes translocate the mammals—for example, from British Columbia to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.)

These data and insights collected by the Hoopa Valley Tribe were eventually used by the state of California to estimate the region’s total population of fishers, said Brett Furnas, an ecologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. A 2017 paper, he and his colleagues estimated 3,200 fishers along the Pacific Coast, or roughly six per 100 square kilometers, but it’s an estimate impaired by much rougher numbers from other areas.

“If a lot of other people were collecting as much data as well as the Hoopa, then we’d have a better model,” he said

Greta Wengert is the executive director of Integral Ecology Research Center. She has been working closely with the Hoopa Valley Tribe since almost 20 years. Wengert, Mourad Gabriel, and co-leading the Integral Ecology Research Center in 2009 dissected a dead fisherman from the forest. The animal’s lungs and intestines were full of blood, but there was no sign of an injury. A toxicological test confirmed the presence of a rodenticide-type blood thinner. The most likely source for the toxicant is cannabis cultivation. Cannabis cultivation.

California and Oregon cannabis growers have placed rodenticide along plastic irrigation lines and around young marijuana plants to deter rats. Fishers can eat the poisoned rats or ingest the rodenticide directly—either way, swallowing enough blood thinner triggers internal bleeding and death.

Wildlife division staff began to follow law enforcement officers to these sites. Higley discovered a fisherman still foaming at one site. An autopsy later revealed pieces of a hot dog laced with poison in the animal’s throat and stomach, suggesting it had died mid-swallow. Higley stated that the tribe knew there were illegal cannabis operations on public land. But until Wengert and Gabriel’s finding, no one had looked for poison in living fishers.

The tribe’s fisher data offered these outside researchers an opportunity to look back in time. Wildlife technicians had collected tissue from dead fishers and sampled them extensively. Gabriel and Wengert reviewed the samples. They found that fishers had been exposed for years to non-lethal levels. The researchers assessed the extent of the problem and found that poison had been detected in 46 of 58 fishers (or 79 percent). This was alarming, especially for some of the more remote populations. Gabriel and Wengert published their findings in a paper in PLoS One.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe’s wildlife staff were the first to collect data on this scale, Gabriel said. When other wildlife researchers saw how useful the data turned out to be, they “started replicating, mimicking the Hoopa project.”

However, funding is a constant struggle for the work. The U.S. provides most of the financial support. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Tribal Wildlife Grants program, a competitive grants program capped at $200,000. The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act of 2021, Introduced in the House by Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan, would boost total funding available to tribes for wildlife work. In the meantime, Higley holds the course: “For us, as long as we have the funding to do anything, we should keep doing anything we have been doing.”

In some ways, he is haunted a gap from the past: Researchers discovered an abundance in fishers in the 1990s. Funding lapsed and then they resumed work in 2005. His group soon realized the decline in population. “It was just mind-blowing to me—orders of magnitude fewer fishers out there, and we’ll never know why for sure,” he said.

Higley stated that fishermen are sensitive animals that must be monitored. However budget constraints make it difficult for Higley to assess whether the current population has reached a stable level. “When you kind of pull back that bare minimum of work, it’s hard to really get a good feel for it,” he said. Colegrove said that he thinks that the population has declined more than a decade since he started to trap and monitor them. “Back in the day, we’d catch one to three a day,” he said. “Now, we’ll go weeks without catching a fisher.”

Colegrove hopes to eventually write more papers using data collected at Hoopa, and he has an eye on growing the wildlife division’s work. He’d like to make it a resource for tribal members who want to hunt these species or know better what’s going on with everything from pileated woodpeckers, also used in regalia, to deer, which figure in every ceremony and provide food and blankets.

“Our culture has everything to do with our resources, our animals, our land, our water—everything that we’ve learned as people came from the landscape, came from the land,” he said.

At the tailgate, Colegrove watched the fisher’s jaw tighten and eyelids twitch as the sedatives wore off. Horan put it in a clean trap and drove the mud roads to where it was caught. Horan placed the trap in a fallen tree covered with moss and opened the door. The fisher’s bushy tail curled out first, followed by a wary eye and nose. Next, the whole body emerged in an explosive burst. The fisher ran down the log then ran away through the brush.