SE Minnesota Fisher Article
Recently, Outdoor News Minnesota published an article about the expansion of fishers back into southeast Minnesota after decades of being extirpated. The cover photo of this article is one I took of fisher F1751, an adult female with an adorable pink birthmark on her nose. It’s exciting to have my photo published, yet I also want to correct some of the misrepresented facts.
When the author wrote, “…despite the lack of fishers’ ideal habitat to use large tree cavities for nesting,” and, “In that mode of survival, it could be leading to female fishers living in closer proximity to one another than the northern population does,” this entire paragraph was misconstrued.
Fishers are at home both in the boreal forest of northeast Minnesota and the oak forests central and southeastern Minnesota. In fact, fishers are actually better suited in the oak dominated forests. Larger diameter, longer lived, and sturdy oaks make for far better, and more – not less – abundant, denning and resting sites than the occasional scattered bigtooth aspen that grow and last long enough in the boreal forest for fishers to use.
On the second note, fishers are not choosing to live closer to each other, or people for that matter. We have torn down their forests and replaced what was once ideal fisher habitat with development, and converted large swaths of forests into agricultural fields. Thus, the only remaining pockets of forest happen to be adjacent to people.
In the second half of the article, the author made a few claims of fishers being aggressive or going after pets. This is a common topic that comes up when you discuss fishers in the East. People blame them for killing house cats, and fishers are often characterized as aggressive and a species for which people should be afraid. A study in Massachusetts that analyzed over 400 scats found that cat DNA was discovered in only 2 scat samples. Fishers and cats are very close in size, and it does not make energetic sense for fishers to actively hunt them given the fact that cats are obviously outfitted with sharp teeth and claws as well. Furthermore, the notion that fishers would make a habit of preying upon dogs is absurd, for all the same reasons as why they wouldn’t prey on cats. Fishers are opportunistic animals like all other animals, but we should not go about spouting rhetoric of largely unfounded ideas when we have a host of information showing that fishers already live along side people with little to no incident, except for the occasional entry into a chicken coop.
Like every other animal on this planet, fishers simply want to be left alone. The less we destroy their habitat and the more we strive to rewild the places we’ve already taken away from them, the better we can coexist.