The fishers and trailcams

We're in a cold spell! Despite this, down I go to the forest. We've had 6 cm snow on top of the ice, and it's a little easier to walk on it. The trailcams showed me the fisher has been a regular visitor. S/he's been a shadow in the forest, and an infrequent visitor.

National Geographic says, "The name ‘fisher’ has no relation to fish, but is derived from ‘fiche’ an old English word for the European polecat and its pelt."

They are members of the weasel family, larger than pine martens. They live in holes in the ground, moving about unless they have kits. It eats porcupines 😖, also mice, chipmunks, squirrels, hares, fawns and, of course, carrion!

We're on a travel route, and while I've seen the fisher now and then, it hasn't been a regular visitor. It follows the edge of the wetland. Many talk of cats being killed by fishers. Despite popular tales and stories, scientists aren't sure that fishers eat a lot of cats.





Surprisingly, there were two, but not together.

Fisher Diets – scientist Roland Kays:

With an undergrad student from SUNY Albany named Paul Gallery, I collected 24 diet samples from suburban fishers. ...We washed the samples and compared the remaining fur, feathers, and bones with our museum collections to identify the remains. We found a little bit of everything — except cat. Comparing our results with published studies showed that the suburban fishers ate more gray squirrels than most (20 percent of their diet). There is one study on fisher diet from Massachusetts that recorded two observations of a fisher eating a cat, but found no cat hair or bones in 226 physical diet samples.

Some say, and I'm inclined to believe it, that it is the coyotes that snatch the cats.

A Massachusetts website says,

Fishers were extirpated from much of the northeast in the 1700s and 1800s when loggers and farmers cleared the forests and unregulated trapping took its toll. During the late 1800s, as farms were abandoned and the land became reforested, fisher numbers rebounded.