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Fisher
Also called: Fisher Marten, Pekan.
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- Length
- 3 feet.
- Description
- Larger and heavier than the weasels and minks, with longer and bushier tail. Grizzly grayish brown, lighter on the fore part of the body and darker brown posteriorly; tip of the tail black; darker also on the throat and legs; tail full and bushy.
- Range
- Boreal regions of eastern North America southward through the Alleghanies; an allied variety replaces it to the westward.
The fisher is by far the largest of the martens as well as one of the handsomest, a long-bodied, vigorous hunter, with the agility of a sable and the strength of a wolverine.
Possessing many of the habits of the pine marten, he has a shrewder intelligence and greater boldness in hunting; for he manages somehow to kill the Canadian porcupine in defiance of his spiny armour, and will circumvent a savage old she bear and kill her cubs while she is away. It is said that the fishers of the Rocky Mountain region even kill young grizzlies in this manner. The fisher's private hunting grounds are gloomy hemlock and spruce covered hills and ridges, where they cover immense distances in a single night, traveling by bounds, nose in the air, to catch every scent that is in the wind.
They are as much at home in the tree-tops as are the pine martens, and climb to where the partridges roost, and catch them in their sleep.
Hares' flesh is their regular diet, but they vary this according to the season and as their appetites and the fortunes of the chase shall determine, their bill of fare ranging from insects and dead fish to bear meat and young venison.
They are also fond of beechnuts like the pine marten, and will go long distances for a sprig of catnip, just as the mink or wildcat will, or an ordinary domestic tabbie.
Fishers sleep all day in hollow trees or logs, preferring a good-sized cavity high up among the branches. In mild weather they like to take their naps on the horizontal branches of fir-trees, stretched at length, like a cat on a window-still.
Although hating settled regions and cultivated lands, they exhibit no special fear of man in the wilderness, often turning the tables on the trapper and following his trail, just as the trapper follows theirs. Many a trapper has been driven almost to desperation by some sly old fisher who insists on looking after his traps for him, pulling marten traps to pieces from behind in order to get at the bait without risking his own precious skin, eating or tearing to pieces any pine-marten or mink that may have been caught, and dragging steel traps out of the snow to spring them. If he should chance to get pinched in a marten trap, his great strength usually sets him free again, teaching him only to be a little more careful the next time.
When at last the trapper has succeeded in outwitting this wily fellow-hunter, and brings his beautiful pelt back to camp, he feels the thrill of triumph of a hard-won victory.
The fisher is one of the very wildest of all wild animals, and I believe that hardly another suffers so much from being caged. Of course, all of the hunters are rendered infinitely miserable and unhappy by being deprived of the freedom which is their life; but of all those that I have seen imprisoned, not even the pine martens or lynxes looked at me with such hopeless despair as the fisher, and I earnestly hope that I may never have to see another in a cage. There is cruelty enough in the woods, heaven knows; but the trapper who sets his steel trap with a spring pole that jerks the game into the air and keeps it hanging by a leg through long days and nights, in all weathers, is merciful by contrast with him who can be hired to catch a full-grown fisher uninjured in order that it may drag out a wasted life in prison for no fault of its own.