Did you know that fishers were once a very rare furbearer in the state of Minnesota?  Here’s a clip from an old Minnesota newspaper back in 1969:

40 years ago (1969)

The long arm of chance reached into the life of Pine River trapper Walter Norman recently. He made trapper’s dream of catching what appeared to be a 15-pound black weasel, but it was a rare fisher, not often seen in Minnesota.

Here’s some info on the fisher population from the Minnesota DNR:

Fishers were nearly extinct in Minnesota by the early 1900s. But the population has grown steadily since then. Since the late 1970s, the population has remained at more than 10,000, enough to support a regulated trapping harvest of about 2,000 each year.