Though Fishers are elusive nighttime roamers who prefer climbing in trees, they seem to be adaptive enough to survive in urban places like Manchester.
Welcome to this week's edition of Something Wild. I'm Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
A friend called me the other day to report a darkly colored wild animal, slinking through her backyard. From her description, it sure sounded like a fisher, a large member of the weasel family. But Michelle lives in Manchester. Do fishers?
Well, this carnivore has made a remarkable comeback across the Northeast. Almost completely wiped out by the late 1800's, fisher populations began to rebound as New England's forests grew back. Better laws and less trapping also helped. Some states even reintroduced the fisher in the 1950's to combat porcupine damage in reforesting areas.
These stark weasels are often called fisher cats, due to their feline-like size and features. Many people blame the loss of their pets on this predator, and considering its opportunistic nature, this is not out of the question. But more typically a fisher prefers smaller fare along the lines of mice, squirrels and chipmunks.
These elusive animals remains surprisingly mysterious. For example, biologists once thought that these tree-climbing nighttime roamers would never venture far from the deep woods. However, like many of our medium-sized predators, fishers are turning out to be much more adaptive than originally believed. Despite the ongoing fragmentation of our forest by residential development, fishers are still doing quite well - perhaps well enough that some of them have decided to venture into places like Manchester, which still has tiny pockets of forests and wetlands tucked behind its tract houses.
And since they regularly roam over ten to twenty square miles, it certainly isn't impossible for fishers to check out the occasional urban yard. All those bird-feeder-fattened squirrels are probably easy targets.
Something Wild is a joint production of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, NHPR, and New Hampshire Audubon. For Something Wild, I'm Rosemary Conroy.
