Bill Walsh lives in East Barre. When we had lunch at a downtown restaurant a few weeks ago, he handed me a picture of a fisher-cat that he had photographed through his living room window. The black, furry creature, walking through Bill’s backyard, seemed indifferent to the civilization in his purview, and his eyes were closed to the bright sun, as if he were savoring the warmth of a spring day. I have seen a variety of wild creatures during my lifetime in the Green Mountains, but I had never seen a fisher cat. I had heard about them, though. They had, we were told, a propensity for eating house cats and a ferocity seldom matched by other denizens of the woods. In Vermont, we called them fisher-cats but that nomenclature is seldom used elsewhere.
Their reputation among my family and friends had achieved a notoriety equaled by few other predators. Maine naturalist Joe Rankin suggests that, as a member of the weasel family, it has a close relationship with the martin, and sometimes it is called a fisher martin, and at other times just a fisher. This mostly nocturnal creature ranges across North America in a wide swath near the northern border.
“The fisher cat,” explains Rankin, “is neither of those things. Doesn’t fish, isn’t a cat.” In fact, one longstanding unfounded belief is that the fisher finds the domestic tabby a near-irresistible delicacy. From the first, fishers were prized for their pelts and trappers had hunted them to extinction, but the Vermont Department of Forest and Parks under central Vermont icon Perry Merrill reintroduced them to the state in the 1950s, in a curious strategy to protect our woodlands.
For a weasel, the fisher has a prodigious size. In 1842, Zadock Thompson’s Natural History cited the following dimensions. “Length from the nose to the insertion of the tale, 23 inches; tail, including the fur, 16 inches.” Thompson elucidates further:
“The name is badly chosen as it is calculated to deceive those unacquainted with the animal with regard to its nature and habits. From its name, the inexperienced would conclude that it led an aquatic mode of life, and that like the otter, it subsisted principally upon fishes. But this is by no means true; and they, who have had an opportunity to observe its habits, aver that it manifests as much repugnance to water as the domestic cat.”
Thompson notes that the animal is much valued in the fur exchange, and its pelts would fetch from one to two dollars from a trader in hides, although naturalist Charles Johnson wrote that, in the 18th century, a single fine pelt “sold for as much as $350.”
Robert Wilson’s Vermont Curiosities (2008) characterizes them as “ferocious and combative with long curved claws and vicious teeth.” Unlike some wilderness predators, the claws of the fisher do not retract, perhaps lending support to the descriptions of their ferocity. Even a staid naturalist like Charles Johnson can fall under the spell of the fisher’s savagery:
“Being a night hunter and an efficient predator, the fisher has been endowed with an aura of ferocity and evil comparable to that of the wolverine. It has been credited with carrying off dogs, cattle, and even children!”
The fisher is singular in its ability to kill a porcupine, a trait that led to its resurrection in Vermont after years of heavy trapping led to its extirpation in the Green Mountains.
It was a combination of habitat loss and unregulated trapping that led to the fisher’s extinction in Vermont. An immediate consequence was that the porcupine population in Vermont burgeoned unchecked, leading to serious damage to the state’s second-growth forests which were nearing maturity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This habitat being ideal for the porcupines, their rapidly increasing numbers wreaked havoc on Vermont’s timber industry by girdling young trees in the course of daily feeding. In desperation, the foresters turned to the fisher to restore equilibrium to the woodlands. Vermont naturalist Ron Rood recounts a logger’s description of the fisher at work in the north woods.
“When I nudged that porcupine with my foot I got a big surprise. He’d been sliced down the middle almost as if with a knife. Then he was hollowed out from the underside the way you’d scoop out a muskmelon.”
Rood also cites a study that shows that “one fisher stomach in three contains a meal of porcupine.” Other writers maintain that if a fisher encounters a porcupine anywhere, anytime, its first response is to kill the rotund rodent. Around 1900, the fisher, for all practical purposes, was extinct in Vermont, and the population of porcupines increased so dramatically that it was necessary to put a bounty on them. According to Rood, the bounty continued from 1903 to 1953 with no discernible effect on the pernicious creatures. Faced with rampant destruction of the woodlands, the Vermont Department of Forests and Parks under Perry Merrill sought to reintroduce the fisher to Vermont forests as a natural method of pest control.
Mindful of the unintended consequences of introducing a species of wildlife, the case of rabbits in Australia being a striking example, the foresters proceeded with caution. The legislature approved $5,000 for porcupine control. In 1959 foresters released a dozen fishers in the Appalachian Gap and Warren area. Each fisher required at least a square mile of territory to live their solitary lives. An article in the Burlington Free Press noted, “The animals released in Vermont by the state were trapped in Maine, where they are currently flourishing. The fisher, and the state’s poison-apple system of controlling porcupines in their dens in the winter time, has superseded the bounty hunter who received a fee for turning in a pair of porcupine ears at a town clerk’s office.”
Upon presenting two porcupine ears to a Vermont town clerk, the hunter would receive the fifty cents bounty. An Associated Press report from March 2, 1957 suggests that some hunters had found a way to produce more than two ears from a dead porcupine.
The Fish and Game Department discovered that some hunters had become so adept, they could fashion sixteen pairs of ears from a single pelt, representing four dollars.
While the entire head of the offending animal was eventually required to receive the fifty cent bounty, a more effective means of porcupine control was finally implemented.
In 1962, the new state forester. Arthur Gottlieb reported that from 3 to 10 fishers had been released in seven Vermont counties. Gottlied went on, “ranging almost continually over a large circular route, the fisher may cover up to 75 miles in a week. It stops to kill and devour every porcupine it encounters.”
A common belief is that the fisher attacks the porcupines belly and kills and eats the large rodent from this ventral surface. Naturalist Roger Powell, who literally wrote the book on the fisher, found that attacks to the face were the initial assault and, once the porcupine had been killed or subdued with these preliminary bites, the fisher rolls its prey over and devours it belly-first. Powell writes in his treatise The Fisher (1993), “Fishers are uniquely adapted for killing porcupines. Fishers are built low to the ground, at the level of a porcupine’s face, and can, therefore, attack a porcupine’s face directly. They are large enough to inflict a substantial wound when they have a chance to bite a porcupine’s face, and yet they are small enough to be quick and agile and dart in and out at a porcupine’s face while avoiding the porcupine’s tail. No other predator has the ability to attack and kill porcupines that a fisher has.”
Kim Royar, a wildlife biologist for the State of Vermont, believes that restoring the normal equilibrium of Vermont’s forests with both porcupine and predator has been essential in preserving a good balance in arboreal Vermont. “It was the maturity of the second-growth forest that made this possible. It restored habitat for the fisher and, therefore, allowed a natural check on the porcupine population.”
Paul Heller is a writer and historian who lives in Barre.
