I thought it so cool that a fisher would take up NYC as home. I find myself rooting for him that a female will show up and a subspecies gradually develops that feeds on rats and adapts to human habitations. It would be so cool to see resident fishers scurring around Los Angeles. Go Fisher!!
At first I thought you were talking about the profession - “What, so he’s fishing in the harbor?”
But yeah, I hope it’ll help with the rats.
The author of the linked article seems to call every animal a rodent. The fisher is called a rodent (near the end of the article), and it seems to lump porcupines in with rodents too.
Fishers are in the weasel family, like a miniature wolverine almost. Porqupines are rodents.
Very cool. First wild turkeys, then coyotes, now fishers. It won’t be long before the Bronx has moose and black bear again.
Roland Kays, the mammal expert cited in the article, is a friend of mine.
How about that. I never knew that.
Maybe the creature my friend and I saw in Princeton last spring was a fisher.
We’d seen a play, had dinner and were strolling the town and campus for a bit when we saw a couple of these…things…that were neither groundhogs, raccoons, or anything else we’d ever seen. We were sort of far away but we saw that they had longish legs and fluffyish tails. They vanished down a sewer grate and we didn’t have the foggiest idea what they were.
In europe they have something called a stone martin i believe. I think we have a small resident population of these that lives in a town somewhere in Wisconsin, they have been there for decades but never seem to expand thier range.
Fishers are nasty animals that kill small outdoor pets. We lost all but one of our ducks to a fisher, and possibly a small indoor/outdoor cat too. I generally like weasels (especially ferrets and martins), but fishers are a big exception.
Probably someone had it as an exotic pet, then got tired of it and set it loose. This is one of the biggest problems with exotic pets. Introducing new species to the area.
I’m not aware of fishers being kept as pets. Considering its recent increase in numbers, and expansion into suburban habits, and the fact that an animal could have easily arrived in that part of the Bronx from farther north by following vegetation along rivers, rail lines, or highways, I think it’s much more likely to be a wild animal.
Yeah, you’re right. It is the bronx and therefore somehow connected to ‘the real world’.
To worms, ducks are nasty. To mice, cats are nasty.