Thread: Bold Fisher Cat
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Old 05-02-2017, 02:54 PM   #32
Airedale1
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Some interesting background info on the Fisher Cat that I found online.

Historical Background

Fishers were extirpated from much of the northeast in the 1700s and 1800s when loggers and farmers cleared the forests and unregulated trapping took its toll. During the late 1800s, as farms were abandoned and the land became reforested, fisher numbers rebounded.

In the 1950s logging companies, with permission from each state, reintroduced fishers into northern New England to control porcupines. At the time, porcupines were decimating seedlings planted by the timber companies to reestablish trees in logged areas. Fisher is the only species to deliberately target porcupines as prey.

In the east they are now found in southern Canada, New England and New York, and in scattered locations in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia.


Food & Diet

For the most part fishers are carnivores, although they will eat berries and fruit when available. They eat rabbits, snowshoe hares, squirrels, raccoons, mice, reptiles, amphibians, insects, carrion (dead or decaying animal flesh), and occasionally house cats. Even though fishers do not catch live fish, they will eat dead fish found on the shore of a lake or pond.

Fishers are one of the few mammals that prey on porcupines. Porcupines are difficult to kill, but a dead porcupine can provide many days of food for a fisher, so it is worth the effort. While on the ground, the fisher continually attacks the only vulnerable portions of the porcupine’s body, its face and underbelly. When facial wounds have weakened the porcupine, the fisher goes in for the kill. To avoid the quills, the fisher eats its prey starting at the head, neck, or underbelly.
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