It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about fishers. The fisher is a large member of the weasel family. It is not a cat, nor is it related to a cat in any way. Calling it a fisher cat is a misnomer.
In researching the fisher cat, I found that they are a minor league, Double A baseball team in Manchester, New Hampshire affiliated with the Toronto Blue Jays. So, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the elusive animal of the woods.
Recently, I read an article about the problem with porcupines in the state of Maine. With their clear-cutting, timber harvesting practices, the new growth trees are a fast growing, deciduous tree in the willow family. Here we call them poplars, they’re aspens in the west and called cottonwoods down south.
So, what animal feeds on these trees, making it their primary diet? Porcupines. And what animal has the ability to kill and eat porcupines? Fishers. So, back to Maine. The number of porcupines increased dramatically as young trees grew. So, to save the timber industry, fishers were trapped in Vermont and New Hampshire and brought into Maine. The problem was solved. The fisher finds a porky up in a tree. He climbs up and uses his sharp claws to slice open the belly of the porcupine, and then he waits. The porcupine bleeds out and drops to the ground where it is consumed by the fisher, and he never got poked by a quill.
I never knew what a fisher was until I moved to the Adirondacks. I saw one mounted on a branch up on the wall in a local tavern, but it was several years before I ever saw one in the wild. As the years passed and I hunted the Adirondacks, I saw the remains of several porkies that were killed and eaten by fishers. All there was left was the skin of the animal.
A few years ago, people started seeing fishers in this area. They had no idea what they were. In the 1970s, the DEC started bringing fishers into central New York and the northern Catskills. It was a perfect location with plenty of food and, they filled the niche. Today it is quite common to see these beautiful animals.
Like other members of the weasel family, they are killers. People have asked me, “Do fishers eat cats?” No, but they will kill and eat chickens, rabbits and pheasants. I know a fellow who raised some pheasants. One morning as he was leaving for work, he noticed something strange. The pheasants in his pen were always making noise. That morning there was silence. Every bird in the pen had been killed. There were fisher tracks all around the pen.
In researching this article, I learned something very interesting about fishers that I never knew. We all know they can climb trees. In fact, they’ll climb up and catch a squirrel in the upper branches quicker than the squirrel can possibly escape. The fisher has an advantage. His hind feet can turn nearly 180 degrees, allowing him to run back down the branches of the tree without any problem.
I’ve seen several on my hill over the years. I had a mother and her two kits on one of my trail cameras one day. They seem to like to travel down a deer path right under my tree stand. I don’t bother them. I feel lucky just to be able to watch them.