A Little Killer
[img_assist|nid=494|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=250|height=166]The fisher has short legs and very snouty head that is full of sharp teeth. It is an excellent climber, exceedingly nimble and quick, and loves nothing better than a nice, tasty porcupine for dinner.
The neighborhood might have been under siege. That, at least, was the way some of the occupants felt. Something was out there, killing pets that had been with some of the families for more than ten years. People had looked, sometimes for days, for cats that had gone outside and not returned the way they always had before. In their distress, the owners of the missing cats eventually had to face the fact that something had killed their pets as well as the possibility that, whatever it was, it was still out there and might kill again, if they brought another housecat into the family and then let it outside, especially at night.
"She was killed," a woman who had lost a cat said to me. "By a fisher cat." She was a friend and she was in distress so I didn’t ask how she could be sure of that. She wanted to know if I could give her the name of someone who might trap the animal.
"I don’t want to kill it," she said. "I just want it taken away … somewhere else."
I told her I would speak to a friend of mine who was a trapper. Or had been, anyway, several years ago when there was still some money to be made in fur. Since then, the market had crashed. Where a good raccoon pelt, in prime, might have brought as much as $50 back in the 80′s, the trapper would be lucky to get $10 today. A lot of the people who had once made a living-or at least some extra money-trapping had given it up.
Before I even had a chance to speak to my friend and ask if he was still trapping, I heard from another woman who was worried about her small dog after her neighbor’s cat had gone missing.
"They think a fisher cat killed her," she said.
These two women lived several miles apart so I assumed that the same animal was not killing cats in their respective neighborhoods. So when I ran into my friend Jack, the trapper, at the post office, I said, "Talk to me about fisher cats."
"You, too?" he said.
"What do you mean?"
"You missing a cat?"
"No. But some friends are."
Jack nodded and said, "All right. But in the first place, they aren’t ‘fisher cats.’ They belong to the weasel family. And if a housecat is missing, it might be that a fisher took it. But it was more likely a coyote. And it could have been a bobcat. Or a fox. It might even have been an owl."
"Then why do you suppose that a fisher always gets fingered?"
Jack shrugged. As though to say there is no accounting for the things some people are willing to think or believe. But it was plain he didn’t think the fisher deserved either to be called a cat or to be blamed for every missing housecat in the area. But he did say it would be okay if I gave his name and number to people, like my friends, who wanted fishers trapped and removed from their property. And I went back home, thinking that I’d like to know more about the little animal with the fierce reputation.
The story of the fisher in Vermont is fairly straightforward-another variation of a fairly common theme. Once, they were abundant and then they became scarce and very nearly extinct. The usual forces accounted for this: loss of habitat due to logging and clearing of the land for farming as well as unregulated trapping and killing by people who wanted either to sell the fur or protect against predation on chickens, lambs, and other livestock. The fisher is prey for other animals that were once native to Vermont-wolves and cougars, especially-but none were as remorselessly successful as the human. By the 1930s, there were no more wolves and cougars and very few fisher.
What there were a lot of was … porcupines……
By Geoffrey Norman
