GRAND FORKS (AP) - A graduate student studying fishers in northeastern North Dakota says he and his research partners are capturing more images of the animals on trail cameras than he would have expected.

Fishers, members of the weasel family, traditionally inhabit forested areas such as those common in northern Minnesota. But for some reason, the furbearers are becoming more prevalent in eastern North Dakota, even in areas with only marginal forest habitat.

Steve Loughry, a graduate student at Frostburg State University in western Maryland, said he and two other research students - Maggie Triska and Steve Pepper - in early June began looking for fisher signs at sites along the Turtle, Red and Tongue rivers.

Triska, of Wilton, also attends Frostburg State, and Pepper is a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, Idaho.

The students started by placing "track plates" - pieces of aluminum set in a box and covered with soot and contact paper - at each location. They use bait such as beaver meat to draw animals to the boxes housing the track plates, Loughry said. Whatever walks on the sooty plate leaves a track on the contact paper.

They also placed digital trail cameras at several of the sites, hoping that whatever came to the track plates would trip the camera shutters.

That's where things have gotten interesting. As of early this week, Loughry said, they had confirmed 29 fisher sightings in 26 different locations.

"We're getting more than you would expect to find for this amount of time," he said. "We figured they'd be more abundant in denser forest, but we're finding them in cow pastures and places like that with few trees.

"Up until recently, you'd have found them in more older-growth forest," he said. "We're finding them in areas you typically wouldn't find them."