Last Sunday morning, at 6:45 a.m., I was looking out my kitchen window and was rewarded with a fisher sighting. This is not the first time I’ve seen a fisher out my kitchen window and when it happens I don’t rush for a camera because I want to observe them for as long as they remain in view. 

 

Last summer we planted corn and left it standing so that we could enjoy watching wildlife as it passed in and out of our “yard”. The yard is really several acres in size, surrounded on three sides by mixed woods which falls away to a brook. Beyond the brook is a tangle of overgrown everything, a very wild, difficult mess to even walk through and therefore the prefect place for all kinds of wild animals to take up residence. 

 

Three times during the summer and fall Randy observed a bobcat behind the house.   We’ve seen moose, bear, coyote, deer, turkey, raccoon and last spring we even had a bald eagle perched in a nearby tree considering our yard for a good long time while I did take a picture.

 

Back to the fisher though, I’m very glad to have him around. I don’t have any house cats to worry about but I do have dogs. Since my father’s dog “Lucky” and her sister “Charm” both received a face full of porcupine quills right in their own yard it is a concern for me and my dogs.  The fisher has a unique appetite for porcupine and based on a recent skunk kill along the same corn field I’m hoping that Mr. Fisher continues to patrol our “yard”.

 

Fishers were once common in Vermont but around the turn of the century, like much of our other wildlife populations, became very rare due to heavy trapping and loss of habitat due deforestation for agricultural purposes. During the ‘50s fisher were reintroduced to help control the porcupine population. Fisher will also eat an occasional fawn, small rodents and birds. They will eat fruit and nuts but I’m pretty sure Sunday’s fisher wasn’t in my corn field looking for corn – which is okay with me.

 

 

My daughter had a much closer encounter last winter when she entered the horse barn where there are no horses but rather her Subaru. When a startled fisher ran up the interior wall of the barn they looked into one another’s eyes for a moment of shared terror before the critter finished scaling the wall and escaped through the large barn door.  Fisher have five semi-retractable claws on each foot and additionally are able to rotate their hind feed 180 degrees therefore able to descend trees, and apparently barn walls, much like we commonly see squirrels descend trees and birdfeeders. 

 

Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife offers a lot of information about fisher as well as other wildlife species – it’s a site I have bookmarked on my computer. Also, available from the state and new this year, is a pocket sized card of animal tracks - great for kids big and small who enjoy going out into the snow to decipher stories discovered in a fresh new covering. I’m still doing the snow dance and we have a new batch of snow. So, while I till can, I’ll pick up a fresh trail and see where it takes me. You do the same – enjoy! Wendy