Fishers!

What: With the winter pretty sloggy and crummy, I thought I'd replace some of my time out wandering with my game cam. Part of the inspiration to put it back up again was a road kill coyote carcass my friend skinned. Yard and I placed the carcass out near Centennial Woods to see if we might get a video of the gray fox I'd been tracking earlier in the winter (haven't seen tracks from it in a few weeks). With the warm weather we were hopeful. While we didn't get the fox, we did get an even better surprise! A few weeks ago, there was some banter on Front Porch Forum about fisher sightings. This is from March 8:

This morning at around 5:45 I saw a cat-sized critter that had a snout and puffy tail run by between the Centennial apartments and cohousing townhouses. It was a little too dark to see color clearly, though I could see that the fur was at least somewhat dark. At first I thought fox, but then thought fisher. Has anyone else seen one lately?

Someone sent a follow up response on March 9:

I too saw a fisher late last week - running through the woods between Latham Court & Thibault Parkway, headed in Colchester Ave. direction. Same time frame - just before dawn. Kitty owners be aware - keep your lovebugs indoors at night! These guys don't fool around. 

While I've seen fishers and tracked them throughout the area, I was skeptical since I hadn't seen any sign this winter of fishers in/around Centennial Woods. I looked for tracks following the second posting and only saw the regular raccoon, possum, house cat, and domestic dogs. Sam spotted a woodchuck out in our yard around the 15th, so it could have been a sleepy whistlepig checking the weather (woodchuck comes from the Cree word, wuchek, which means, you guessed it, fisher; apparently early whites couldn't tell the difference between the two animals and confused the term).

Not that my video confirms that my neighbors saw a fisher, but it certainly indicates that this is possible. The fisher in the video is most likely a male (males are significantly larger than females, almost twice as big). Males also have much larger home ranges than females (up to ~7 miles in winter, but in Burlington this could be smaller with the abundance of squirrels, particularly red squirrels in and around Centennial Woods), so their spotty presence may be due to patrolling their territory.

We also captured squirrels interacting with the carcass, which was pretty interesting to watch.