Fisher F003 was less than a year old when University of New Hampshire researcher Rem Moll’s team found her on campus one October day in 2024.
These animals (which aren’t cats, but rather large weasels) are usually born in the spring. Then, during their first winter, they’ll set out to set up their own territory. Moll said researchers call that behavior a “dispersal.”
“This is an instinctual movement. They're born, they're raised with mom. They grow. They hit: ‘It's time to go off on your own. See the world,’ ” he said. “They instinctively leave and set out on their own. What happens after that . . . there’s a lot of variability.”
Moll’s team outfitted F003 with a GPS collar and started tracking her. First, she started moving south, and hit the Great Bay, which she couldn’t cross. Then, she traveled back to Durham and tried again, moving into Maine.
Then, in early 2025, she crossed back into New Hampshire, traversed a frozen Lake Winnipesaukee, and moved north, looking for space with enough food and few other female fishers. She ended up settling in Lincoln — a town similar in size to Durham, not counting college students.
“Maybe she’s got a search image of what she thinks home should look like, and she settled into that when she arrived,” Moll said.
Most fishers move about 12 miles to find their own territory after they leave their mothers. F003 seems to have taken a roughly 80 mile path, ending up 73 miles from her starting place — the longest documented dispersal journey for a fisher.
“The fact that they can move this far in such a short period of time is quite remarkable. This is a small animal we're talking about,” Moll said. “So just the sheer distance moved is quite amazing and impressive to me.”
The distance is especially impressive given the threats fishers face: disease, development that disrupts their forested habitats, cars and rodenticides are just a few.
There is one recorded instance of a similarly long dispersal of a young fisher in the 1990s, and one adult fisher moved about 100 miles after being taken from Minnesota and released out west, according to Moll.
Scientists believe the maximum distance a young fisher looking for territory could go is a bit over 100 miles. But only 55 individual fishers have been tracked across all of North America. As landscapes change, becoming more developed and less snowy, Moll said, fishers may need to move longer distances to find new homes.
The tale of Fisher F003 has a sad ending. She died last December, likely killed by a bobcat.
“The team was very sad when we learned this because we’ve become attached to her,” Moll said. “But that was her ultimate fate.”
He says F003’s journey shows the importance of fishers in broader ecosystems. They spread seeds and fungal spores, moving plants from place to place. Also, he said, it shows the way these animals may shift from state to state, impacting conservation.
“Fisher don’t know about political boundaries,” he said. “It speaks to the importance of coordinating management.”
And, Moll said, watching one fisher move so far reminded him that the forest contains a hidden world — one we can only glimpse.
“There are all these wildlife, all these species trying to make it on their own,” he said. “They’re doing these incredible things that we would have no idea [about.] We just happened to have a GPS collar on this individual.”
