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Fishers in Connecticut: A return of the wild
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A fisher. U.S. Fish & WIldlife Service photo.
Some New Englanders call them fisher cats, but they’re not cats and they don’t usually fish. The fisher (Martes pennanti) is a member of an ancient and diverse family of predatory animals known to biologists as the Mustelidae—the weasel family. Mustelids typically have long bodies, short legs, and a reputation for foul temperaments and sudden violence. Most of them have scent glands used for marking their territories and communicating with the opposite sex. They’re distantly related to dogs. In North America, the Mustelidae include river and sea otters (the latter being the only mustelids without scent glands), ferrets, badgers, all the weasels, minks, martens, wolverines, and fishers.
The fisher takes its name from a much smaller, mustelid cousin, the European polecat or fitch, which was once also known as fitchew, fitchet, fitcher, and by other variant names. Fitch apparently derives from the Old French fissau, a polecat, and has nothing to do with fish.
Fishers are native to Connecticut. Adult males typically weigh about eight to ten pounds, females about four to six. A big male may exceed 40 inches in length from nose to tail. Except for a brief time during the spring mating season, fishers are solitary. The females care for the young, usually two to four kits born in March or April. Fishers are primarily rodent hunters, their prey most frequently including squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, mice, and voles. They will prey on domesticated cats and small dogs, but neither is a large part of the fisher’s diet. Fishers are famously known to hunt and kill porcupines, and they will scavenge gut piles left on the ground by successful deer hunters. They’re deadly in a hen house.
The fur of the fisher is thick, soft, and lustrous, dark brown to black in color, and highly desirable in the fur trade. Trapping and habitat loss led to the complete extirpation of fishers in Connecticut by around 1870. Reforestation, however, created the right conditions for the return of the fisher, and by the 1970s, fishers expanding their range from Massachusetts had moved back into much of eastern Connecticut. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) successfully reintroduced fishers into western Connecticut in 1988 and 1989, releasing thirty-two animals caught by trappers in Vermont and New Hampshire.
Fishers can be found today across Connecticut, except in urban environments. DEP wildlife biologist Paul Rego says that they’re generally more common east of the Connecticut River than on the west side, although there appears to be a pocket on the west side, in the Haddam-Durham area, with a relatively high fisher population. Paul suspects that fishers from east of the river crossed the Connecticut River in this area. Good, statewide population data are hard to come by, but Paul roughly estimates that the state’s current fisher population numbers between 800 and 1,400 animals. A limited trapping season for fishers was begun in 2005. Fishers can be legally trapped from November 8 to November 30, with a limit of two per trapper per season. During the 2007-08 season, DEP tagged 174 fisher pelts harvested by Connecticut trappers.
Fishers mostly hunt at night, but they may be active at any time of day. On a sunny Memorial Day afternoon in 2004, my family and I watched from the deck of our house as a fisher made its way across our wooded property in North Guilford. Spotting a gray squirrel in a white oak, the fisher ran pell-mell up the tree in pursuit. Squirrels are fast, agile climbers, but this one didn’t stand a chance. The fisher caught up to the squirrel and ran it twice around the tree trunk before seizing it by the neck and killing it. The fisher carried the squirrel part way down the tree, dropped it, and then headed back up—it had seen a second squirrel higher in the tree. This second squirrel retreated into the highest part of the canopy, crossing from one tree to another. The fisher gamely gave chase, but it was too heavy to keep up with the squirrel in those thin twigs, and it eventually gave up and came back down the trunk of an adjacent hickory.
I put my two-year old daughter on my shoulders and we walked over to see the first squirrel. It lay at the base of the oak tree, dead but still twitching. Seeing us near its kill, the fisher ran toward us, stopping about thirty feet away. It raised itself up on its back legs and chirped at us, hoping to chase us away. I barked in reply, and the fisher ran off a short distance, but it immediately turned around and charged back, again raising itself up and vocalizing. We finally backed away from the squirrel, and the fisher ran in to claim its prize. We last saw it bounding away through the woods, the squirrel clamped firmly in its jaws. Since then, we’ve seen fishers every year on our place, most recently in late March, and usually in broad daylight. Each time we see one, it returns us, just a little, to the wild.
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