[BigV]

Fishers released into Olympic National Park.

It's not all regress.

OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK – The elusive fisher, famous for its fabulous fur and for picking fights with porcupines, slipped back into the wilds of Washington Sunday. Its mission: to re-establish a homeland.

Fishers, cat-sized members of the weasel family, have been missing from Washington’s forest landscape for decades, wiped out by early 20th-century trappers.

On Sunday, biologists released 11 Canadian fishers – five males and six females – into the dense thickets of the park’s Elwha River and Morse Creek drainages, near the Olympic Peninsula city of Port Angeles.

“They just took off like a shot,” said Jeff Lewis, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist. “You just see a streak of black rushing across the ground and they disappear.”

Sunday’s release was the first step in a state, federal and privately supported effort to revive the state’s population of the sleek, dark carnivores. But it also was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for three Port Angeles youngsters invited to help set some of creatures free.

“I couldn’t imagine I would be doing this. This is something to pass down to my children,” said Kelsey Coffman, 13, a member of the Animal Activists club at Stevens Middle School.