06/06/2026
In 1969, West Virginia traded wild turkeys to New Hampshire for twenty-three fishers. New Hampshire needed turkeys. West Virginia needed fishers. Both states had lost a native species to the same combination of overtrapping and deforestation, and both states solved the problem by trading what they had too many of for what they had none of.
Twenty-three fishers. That was the entire seed stock. Fifteen were released on Canaan Mountain in Tucker County. Eight went into Cranberry Glades in Pocahontas County. Both release sites sat inside the Monongahela National Forest, where the hardwood and spruce-fir forests that fishers depend on had finally grown back after the industrial clear-cutting that stripped the state bare in the early 1900s.
The fisher had been gone from West Virginia since roughly 1912. Unregulated trapping took the animals. Deforestation took the habitat. When you have a forest species and no forests for those animals to live in, that is what happens, said Rich Rogers, the Division of Natural Resources furbearer project leader.
Not everyone was happy to have them back. Tucker County residents responded with anger and fear. Some people thought fishers were some kind of demon animal, Rogers said, that they would make their way into people's bedrooms and steal babies. Pocahontas County, where the other eight were released, had no such reaction. Nobody in Pocahontas County saw the new residents as a threat.
The fifteen fishers on Canaan Mountain thrived. Within six years, the population had grown large enough that the state opened a trapping season. One fisher per trapper per year. Trappers took animals that first season. The population kept growing anyway. Rogers explained the math. Fishers are a lot harder to trap than otters, he said. A limited harvest on a growing population in dense forest does not suppress the population. It skims the surplus.
The eight fishers at Cranberry Glades did not expand the same way. That population maintained a limited range in Pocahontas County and never exploded outward the way the Tucker County animals did. Whether the difference was habitat quality, founder genetics, or simple numbers, fifteen versus eight, has not been conclusively determined.
The Canaan Mountain fishers did not stay in West Virginia. They moved north into Maryland. They moved northeast into Virginia. They moved northwest into southwestern Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Game Commission credits West Virginia's 1969 release as the direct source of its present-day fisher population in the western part of the state. Maryland's fishers in the Appalachian counties trace to the same twenty-three animals. A single release of twenty-three New Hampshire fishers into one West Virginia mountain became the founding population for fishers across four states.
New Hampshire, meanwhile, used the wild turkeys it received in the trade to establish breeding populations that had been extirpated from the state by hunting and habitat loss. The turkey reintroduction became one of the greatest wildlife success stories in the Northeast. New Hampshire now has both spring and fall turkey seasons and it is routine to see them crossing roads and standing in fields. The trade worked for both sides. Turkeys for fishers. Both species came back.
Then the genetics told a stranger story.
In 2021, researchers at West Virginia University collected DNA samples from fishers across West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and the New Hampshire source population. The objective was to measure the genetic diversity of the reintroduced population and assess whether twenty-three founders had created a viable gene pool or a genetic bottleneck. The results surprised everyone.
The modern West Virginia fisher population was not built solely from the twenty-three reintroduced animals. The DNA showed markers that did not match the New Hampshire source stock. The researchers determined that a small number of native West Virginia fishers had survived the logging era. They had persisted in the deepest, most remote timber of the Monongahela while every biologist, trapper, and wildlife manager in the state agreed they were gone. We determined that we did not extirpate fishers, said WVU researcher Amy Morris.
The reintroduction did not create a population from nothing. It reinforced a population that was already there, invisible, surviving in the dark timber while the state traded turkeys for its replacements. The twenty-three New Hampshire fishers mixed with a remnant that nobody knew existed, and the resulting hybrid population is what expanded across four states over the following five decades.
Twenty-three fishers and a handful of ghosts built the fisher population of the central Appalachians. The ghosts were there the whole time. Nobody looked hard enough to find them because everyone had already agreed they were gone.
Source: West Virginia Division of Natural Resources / Pennsylvania Game Commission / West Virginia University, 2021 / Wonderful West Virginia Magazine, November 2025.
