Granite Geek: Fisher’s long-distance jaunt was a tech celebration

The story of a young female fisher who walked from a UNH parking lot all the way to Franconia Notch looking to establish a new home is intriguing, despite its sad ending. But the really interesting part is what it says about the way technology is giving us incredible insight to the wild world.

“It has really changed the entire way that we do research,” Rem Moll, an associate professor at UNH, said of using GPS to track wildlife, the approach used in the report on the travels of the fisher known as F003. “Being able to track animals as they move through the landscape on their own — that was just a completely new door that was opened for all sorts of questions and research on behavior, movement, mortality, survival.”

The young fisher — a species that, as you know, is a member of the weasel family and is absolutely, definitely not a cat — was trapped at the B parking lot of UNH in Durham. The location is interesting in itself, since it might indicate that the elusive fisher is following in the footsteps of coyotes, bobcats and raccoons by learning to be more comfortable around humans.

Be that as it may, the fisher was equipped with a small GPS collar and let loose to keep track of her dispersal, the term for young animals heading away from their birth home.

During February 2025, she went in a relatively straight line toward the White Mountains, eventually ending up in the town of Lincoln, a remarkable 143 kilometers away. She was pregnant but unfortunately was killed. The culprit was probably by a bobcat, since bobcats and fishers are mortal enemies.

Moll said this appears to be longest ever recorded trek by a juvenile fisher, although the paper adds, “We suspect movements of this distance could occur with some frequency given fishers’ vagility.” That analysis taught me a new word; it means the degree to which an organism spreads out within an environment.

Her travel was all the more remarkable because snow was quite heavy on the ground at the time. It adds another data point to consider when forecasting wild populations or designing wildlife corridors — and it wouldn’t have been possible without GPS.

For a very long time, the only way to know what animals were doing in the woods — how many there were, what species, where they moved and how they interacted — was to go and look at them. Reports and carcasses from hunters were a big part of the data collection, which is an imperfect method.

A half-century ago that started to change, Moll explained, with the first Very High Frequency radio collars. They required wandering around while carrying an antenna and listening for “pings” from a collar. My daughter did that one summer, literally walking in the woods carrying what looked like a TV aerial taken from the roof of a mobile home.

Despite that clumsiness, Moll said, “it really was a revolution, being able to track animals for the first time.”

Then along came GPS from satellites and things got a lot better. They have only improved since.

For example, many collars now have accelerometers that detect motion, which among other things tells you quickly when the animal is dead so the collar can be collected.

Even better, collars have increasingly good video, providing information about interactions. This might help with things such as forecasting the spread of disease-bearing ticks as they fall off one animal and climb onto another one nearby.

All this has produced a surprising conundrum. After decades of trying to work with limited information about what wild animals actually do, wildlife biologists now have almost too much information.

“We are inundated with data,” Moll said. Wading through it all to find important connections can require all sorts of mathematical and computer skills as well as the fieldwork skills researchers have always needed.

“These days our work is a combination of highly technical analytics and getting out into the field. My team is out there this morning checking traps,” he said.

But that’s OK, Moll said, because it opens up “all these exciting opportunities for research.”

He pointed to a study which combined movement data with gut data to record how fungal spores are moved around the environment not just when they’re eaten and then pooped out by herbivores but when those herbivores are themselves eaten by carnivores, changing expectations and forecasts.

“That’s a good example of combining data sets for insight we would never have gotten from just one of them.”

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