Fisher Team

What We're Working on Now

During the last 2-3 months the SNAMP Team has been very busy with Fall and Winter season trapping, while also conducting camera surveys focused in and around the Key Watersheds part of the Fisher Study Area. Fall and Winter is typically the busiest and most critical period of the year for trapping; our goal is to capture as many of the juvenile “young of the year” fishers prior to late winter-spring when a good number of these animals will disperse out of the study area.

The exceptionally good news is that we have had the most successful trapping season since the study began back in Fall 2007. In addition to capturing 11 juvenile fishers, we were able to capture many previously unknown fishers in several new areas, and many “dropped collar/missing” animals were recaptured and fitted with new radiocollars. Our goal has always been to maintain a minimum of 20 actively monitored radiocollared animals at all times, but we had fallen uncomfortably below that number last fall (September/October) when we had just 17 animals. Just before Christmas, however, we set a new record for the project when we reached 35 radicollared fishers. We resumed trapping after the holidays and currently have 45 actively monitored fishers roaming around the study area. This is good news for the project, and it suggests that the population has recovered from the low survival documented during 2010-11.

Mortalities have been few and far between during the Fall and Winter period (Oct 2011 to Feb 2012), a pattern that has emerged as being typical for the population. We have documented just two mortalities among our radiocollared population of fishers since August.

The other big news from SNAMP Fisher has been our “Sock Drive”, aided by Anne Lombardo from the Public Participation Team. When I say big news I really mean it – the local sock drive effort we started back in late November blossomed into a nationwide effort involving many, many people after word spread by blogs, twitter, and other forms of “Social Media.” Many newspapers in California reported on our sock drive, as did many web sites across the country. The result has been deluge of socks, and we’ll never have to buy a single sock to hang baits for our camera surveys or live trapping again! Thanks to Anne and the many folks who contributed their time, money, and humor to the success of the SNAMP Fisher Sock Drive (Letter of Thanks to sock contributors from Rick Sweitzer).

I am also posting pdf files of seven posters and one oral presentation including new or updated data from the SNAMP Fisher Project that we prepared and presented at meetings in Sacramento, CA in early February. The meetings were the West Coast Fisher Symposium and the Annual Meeting of the Western Section of The Wildlife Society.

The fall and winter trapping season will end in about 2 weeks when we will begin to closely monitor all of the current radiocollared subadult and adult-aged female fishers with the potential to produce offspring during the 2012 denning season. News on how the 2012 denning season goes will be reported in June, once the dust from that very busy period for the project has settled out some.

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Discussion

Kim_Ingram said at 11:33 a.m., 6 February 2012 ,

Can you provide a "working" definition the researchers are using for spotted owl occupancy. Is it simply occupancy (i.e ...

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Kim_Ingram said at 1:25 p.m., 3 November 2011 ,

Dear Ms. Dobrovolny:

At the annual SNAMP meeting, I explicitly stated that I did not know what is causing this ...

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Kim_Ingram said at 9:38 a.m., 3 November 2011 ,

The following comments and questions were asked by Lorna Dobrovolny from CA Dept. of Fish and Game:

'I work with ...

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