A Tale of Three Weasels, Revisited

Photo: David Moskowitz

A while back, I wrote an article about three species of mustelids (members of the weasel family) in Washington whose populations were decimated by trapping and poisoning a century ago. “A Tale of Three Weasels” describes scientific efforts to better understand the needs of wolverines, fishers, and the martens of the Olympic Peninsula as these animals strive to recover from a rocky past. The article was published in the Summer 2019 issue of Earth Island Journal, and can be read here.

This summer, Robert and I are dividing our field time among this tenacious trio of carnivores.

We began the season in the Olympic National Forest, where we’ve been working with Forest Service biologists to deploy motion-triggered cameras and automated scent dispensers in hopes of detecting rare martens over the winter. We’ve deployed 6 stations in total, half of them during a recent backpacking trip into an alpine lake wilderness where martens should feel right at home. I know I did!

Early July brought us to the North Cascades, our ninth year monitoring wolverines in one of my favorite places. But once again we came face-to-face with climate change as a very real threat to mountain wildlife (and people). Only days after we’d removed a camera from a desiccated drainage—where we’d photographed, among other animals, two tiny bear cubs—a lightning strike sparked a wildfire that still rages today. We’ve postponed our return to the region until fall, although the forests may well continue to burn until the winter rains.

And then there are fishers, reintroduced first to the Olympics and more recently to the Cascades. In mid-July, we gathered with a team of biologists near Mt. Rainier to organize a survey effort now underway. Robert and I deployed our own stations just this week, bushwhacking through huckleberries and hornets to set up our sites.

As a conservation story, this tale of three weasels has only just begun.