Fisher at Ipswich River in 2012 (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

27 February 2026

Enjoy the magic of the north woods in this video from @voyageurswolfproject on Instagram.

This video was captured on a trail cam by the Voyageurs Wolf Project, a Univ of Minnesota research project that studies wolves in and around Voyageurs National Park. The park is in “The Arrowhead” of Minnesota on the U.S.-Canadian border in a huge wild area that includes Voyageurs, Superior National Forest, and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in the U.S., and Quetico Provincial Park in Canada.

Map of BWCA and surrounding national parks and forests from Wikimedia

There are many familiar animals in the video but you might not recognize the animal standing on its hind legs at the beginning. It’s a fisher (Pekania pennanti), an omnivorous member of the weasel family that is only the size of a large house cat. To put its size into perspective, here’s a porcupine and a fisher near each other.

screenshot from PA Game Commission fisher reintroduction video

Fishers were extirpated from Pennsylvania when we cut down our forests but have been reintroduced by the PA Game Commission. This 33 minute video tells their story in PA.