I'm picking up a few more fisher this week with the snow. I'm guessing theyre getting hungry but unfortunately the season closes here where I am the 15th.
I too live in a zone that the season ends the 15th.
Fisher have always been watched like the proverbial Hawk, and often over regulated. I would consider most if not all of the restrictions put on fisher over the years to be capricious and ludicrous.
Fisher numbers have always fluctuated as a course that nature follows. Having spent thousands of hours in the woods on snow I have seen first hand how populations change.
Fisher are not in danger during these times. Not at all.
If the market is high, it is a bit of a different story. In a high market which I may never live to see again,
It makes absolutely no sense in having a month long season in areas in which other animals can be harvested. I do not have a degree as a biologist but have spent considerable time trapping and studying wildlife in the last fifty years, so therefore have learned a bit.
I have caught fisher in coyote and bobcat sets through the years that had to be released. Not a good deal if you have any inclination of common sense. Common sense truly has become a super power.
It was my understanding that the state was concerned with a box open ended the size of a 120 or 5x5 due to the fact that during testing it appeared that a lynx kitten might fit in one. Well ye old science experts, there is not much of a chance of a Lynx kitten or kitten size roaming around the woods in November or December, Those varmints will be adult size by that time of the year.
But again, I suggest that common sense may be a super power.
I, like many of my friends had hoped to be able to run a true long line for fisher and marten when I retired.
The investment in purchasing a car hauler to transport in efficient boxes into the North woods does not make it feasible.
The feds and the state have ended that dream of many of us.
It is sad that wildlife management does not exist. Instead it is a matter of appeasing the antis and the dam feds. Neither of which have a clue about true wildlife management, and neither care a dam thing about the animals.
As for the anti groups, it is more about furnishing salaries for a bunch of useless and certainly misdirected humans that would chose any other cause if there were bigger salaries in that.
As for the feds expertise; look at any of the government. Case closed.
Mac
