Inside the Hoopa Valley Tribe's Quest to Understand a Rare Carnivore

[Judi Lynn]

The tribe maintains some of the most detailed documentation of fishers in North America

Elizabeth Miller, Undark
March 28, 2022



A captured fisher is released after undergoing sedation and physical examination, a part of the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s longstanding efforts to monitor the culturally important species. Elizabeth Miller

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. Meanwhile, a weasel-like animal called a fisher waited nearby, making glottal noises inside a wire trap.

Colegrove is a field technician with the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s wildlife division. He and a colleague, Holly Horan, coaxed the squirming fisher out of the trap and into a metal cone that restrained the mammal while Colegrove injected a sedative into its rump.

Colegrove and Horan then commenced an exhaustive examination of the sedated mammal, taking her temperature, swabbing her eyes and nose, drawing blood, and examining the small pale hooks of her claws and her gleaming teeth. Additionally, Colegrove noted and photographed each tuft of pale fur, a dollop of cream on an otherwise coffee and cinnamon pelt.

The young fisher had been trapped before, as evidenced by a microchip embedded below her skin. The information collected by Colegrove and Horan would add to a larger pool of data, offering insights into the life of this one fisher and into the larger population of fishers around the town of Hoopa and beyond. “When we do do stuff, we go above and beyond what everybody else is doing,” Colegrove said.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/inside-the-hoopa-valley-tribes-quest-to-understand-fishers-180979783/