It isn’t often one sees a fisher. Ok, for me, it is never. There was that one time in the UP, when the husband was driving, and I was knitting in the passenger seat passing the time. He yelled “fisher!” and I looked up to see the tail disappear into the woods – only no, I didn’t. I wanted to see the tail disappearing into the woods, but I’m pretty sure I just created the image in my head. I’m being honest.
fisher tracks
But this time, I saw the sucker!
We were surveying a section of woods. I had just answered a question about the chances of seeing a fisher during the day with a confident “slim to none.” Fisher tracks were everywhere, though, and I sent one high school student after a particularly fresh-looking set of tracks. The rest of us continued on our gridded path, but we heard a shout, and turned to look in that direction, and lo – ! A brown streak, bigger than a housecat and going a million miles an hour shot south between us and the other student. Damn if it wasn’t a fisher. With my heart pounding and adreniline rushing, i loped over to the student, who was still yelling. No, he hadn’t been mauled. He was standing at the base of a red pine looking down at a freshly severed porcupine head with a trailing of skin and quills.
Zoinks!
We tracked north and we tracked south but both tracks led us to nothing. I would have kept tracking, but the kids were looking a little worn out, and though excited, they weren’t quite as impressed as I was with what we’d just witnessed.
I still haven’t put together what happened. We never came across a kill site. The fisher tracks were clean – no blood or quills. Just the head partially cleaned, the brains and eyes eaten. The victim was a juvenile, and the skull has and will be usefull in teaching how to age the animals. There are three molars on either side of the lower jaw, with a fourth emerging, as if for a textbook on how to differentiate a juvenile from a yearling. I hope to have the kids clean the skull, and we’ll add it to the collection of different ages of skulls.
What the fisher left behind
This week we skirted that same area, and followed an otter track all over the place, but no fisher. No porcupines, either.
Porcupine Chronicles 