Good luck seeing this black cat
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Illustration by Mike
Storey |
People around here generally speak of fishers
with a touch of awe; most sightings are fleeting and ghostly, the
stuff of folklore. As the luckless years pass me by, seeing a fisher
has become something akin to catching a glimpse of the Holy Grail.
Some call them “black cats” or “fisher cats,”
and they do climb trees with the help of retractable claws, but
the similarity to cats ends there. They are in fact among the largest
members of the weasel family, some reaching nearly four feet from
nose to tail tip.
The name probably arose from a loose resemblance to Europe’s
“fitch ferrets” rather than from a taste for fish.
Sure, I see plenty of tracks in winter, many of them not far from
my house. Every one of them taunts me with “I was here; where
were you?” The weasel heritage gives fishers a characteristic
looping gait in which the forepaws land close together, the rear
end hunches forward like a Slinky toy, and the back paws press a
second set of twinned dimples in the snow behind the first. The
best places to look are in dense boreal forests (dominated by red
spruce and balsam fir) with thick canopies, especially where snowshoe
hares are abundant.
Folks who know fishers often associate them with porcupines, because
they are among the few predators that kill and eat porkies. The
process is long and rather rough on the sensibilities, involving
multiple nips to the face leading to a sudden rollover and biting
of soft underparts. But hares are favored despite their speed, perhaps
because they don’t have potentially deadly, deep-penetrating
quills.
Birds, mice, squirrels and even plants round out this hunter’s
cuisine, along with the occasional side dish of carrion.
The closest I’ve ever gotten to a fisher (not counting the
one that sauntered boldly through the parking lot on campus one
winter morning just minutes before I arrived for work) was when
one of the maintenance fellows at Paul Smith’s College walked
into my office with one. Unfortunately for me, not to mention the
fisher, it was dead; the guy’s a trapper. If he can be believed
(are trappers more honest than anglers?), he has trapped amazing
numbers of fishers in these parts for years with no signs of depletion.
How many of them live around here, anyway? I’ve never heard
a count given, but I’m not sure I’d believe it if I
did. Fishers are furtive and live in thick woods, so they’re
pretty hard to find even if your name is not Curt Stager. Surely,
any direct count would be an underestimate. A wildlife biologist
did recently tell me that Adirondack fisher populations are booming,
but I’m sure that’s impossible; otherwise I’d
have seen one by now, right?
Once I got over my surprise, I spent a long time admiring the dead
fisher. Its fur was a rich coffee color and so thick and soft to
touch that it practically pulled my fingers into it. The tail was
a spectacular fountain of long, dark fur. I was surprised to learn
how little that luscious pelt would sell for, maybe $30. In years
when fishers are less common (due in part to cyclic hare population
declines?), their pelts bring as much as $200. The man holding it
nose down spoke knowledgeably and with great admiration for the
innumerable fishers he has trapped, and I marveled at how we humans
can harbor such seemingly contradictory feelings and behaviors within
a single personality.
Feelings for or against the fur trade aside, I find some comfort
in knowing that trapping is the biggest threat that fishers face
from us here in the Adirondacks, where habitat loss isn’t
much of a problem at the moment. They don’t prey on livestock
or otherwise upset people enough to raise calls for extermination,
and some folks are glad to have them around as a check on pesky
porkies. And in spite of my continued longing to see one alive in
the wild, just knowing that fishers are out there adds a welcome
touch of mystery to my enjoyment of the North Woods.
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