I have no problem with an animal or bird species re-establishing itself naturally through range expansion but the forced introduction always has these unwanted consequences.
Fishers were introduced in Ct. a few years back and now they are in every grid square in the state. They eat anything they can catch, including Tabby the cat. They may like porcupine in the uncolonized areas of Canada but down in these latitudes the menu are squirrels, rabbits, ground hogs, muskrats, small rodents and any bird they can catch, among a host of other forms of food.
Fishers can dig, climb trees, wiggle through tiny spaces and burrows, etc. They are a killing machine. They have the hunting skills of a weasel or a mink but so much larger.
The decline in our game bird populations is most often attributed to habitat loss but the real culprit are predators, primarily from hawks and owls. Here in Ct. there are no more huntable populations of grouse whereas in the 80s when I moved here that was not the case.
In the 1960s when I traveled from NJ to State College down Rt 22 to Harrisburg, the road was littered with pheasant carcasses from birds killed flying across the highway and hitting 18 wheelers. Now, no more.
The decline in youth trapping has caused a huge increase in opossums, skunks, raccoons, and fox. Add in the range expansion of the eastern coyote, bobcats, bears and now the predators have absolute control of the prey species.
The elimination of DDT, and its impact on nesting mortality due to broken egg shells, has brought back the hawks and owls. By themselves they were a balance to the game birds but now there simply are too many predator species at high population densities.
Bringing in Fishers to control porcupines was so dumb that it almost smacks as a straw-man argument to cover up whatever real or imagined goal the Game Commission and other states really had in mind.
