Wildlife Wednesday 02/26/2025

Happy #Wildlife Wednesday! 

The fisher is a forest-dwelling carnivorous mammal in the mustelid family. Mustelids include animals such as otters, weasels, badgers, ferrets, wolverines, and minks.

Fishers have long thin bodies with glossy fur coats and weigh around 5 to 15 pounds, with males being larger than the females. Despite their common name, fishers do not eat fish very often, consuming instead animals like rabbits and hares, birds, insects, and other small mammals. They are also one of the only predators able to successfully hunt porcupines. 

Native to North America, they prefer thick forests with closed canopies and are competent tree climbers, though they spend most of their time low on the ground. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were eliminated from parts of their range due to trapping by humans for their pelts and the logging industry eliminating their habitat. Fishers were completely extirpated from Ohio in the mid-1800s.

Generally solitary, fishers interact with each other for mating during the spring. Implantation is delayed for 10 months, until February of the following year, at which time the female will then become pregnant. After a 50-day gestation, a litter of 1-4 kits is born.

In 2023 a roadkill fisher was collected by biologists in Ohio. Laboratory testing revealed that the animal was a female and excitingly was also pregnant, providing hope for natural reproduction by fishers in our state again. Since 2013 there have been approximately 40 confirmed observations of fishers in Ohio, the first modern-day sightings since their disappearance. The bulk of these have occurred in the last 4 years in Northeast counties, indicating that fishers are moving in from Pennsylvania and naturally colonizing Ohio once again!

Reports of fishers, including trail camera footage, photos, road kill sightings, and so on, should be shared with the Ohio Division of Wildlife so that the population of fishers can be effectively monitored.