Over the coming months, Maine Audubon will feature posts by guest writers – including participants in the Maine Master Naturalist Program – on wildlife and naturalist topics. If you’d like to explore contributing a post, send an email to outreach@maineaudubon.org.
As part of the Maine Master Naturalist program, we focus on monthly fields of interest, and most recently our course of study has been wildlife tracking. As a wildlife artist, I was very interested to find out what was wandering our woods and fields in North Yarmouth, and perhaps get some game cam pics for reference.
It wasn’t long before I found the bounding tracks of a Fisher, a member of the mustelid (weasel) family, cruising through our back field to the woods beyond. The Fisher is a much maligned and misunderstood animal, though in reality its diet consists of rodents and porcupines much more than household cats. The Fisher is a solitary animal, and only connects with members of the opposite sex around breeding time, which happens to be February-March in our neck of the woods. The males are noticeably larger than the females (the term is sexual dimorphic for us nature nerds), and so by the track sizing I was sure I had a male.
I carefully set my game cam where the tracks had been crossing the field regularly, only to have the Fisher outsmart me several times by climbing down the tree the cam was attached to and walking behind it, or walking so close to the cam that all I could get was a blurry back pic. After the latest new snowfall I set out to find a better place to get my shot. It happened to be Valentines Day. I soon found the reliable male Fisher tracks near our seasonal stream and followed them backwards for a while, until I noticed it seemed like there were extra tracks in the path beyond what my male Fisher would make on his own. Sure enough, farther down the track line the animals diverged and the extra set of tracks turned out to be a female Fisher!
Her tracks were quite a bit smaller than the males (2” across vs 3” for the male) and it was fairly easy to follow their paths as they merged and broke up then connected again. I eventually found where they marked a snow covered stump with urine (game cam spot), and then tracked them to a large set of downed trees where the female went into a den and the male wandered off. It’s great to have these interesting carnivores making their living in our neighborhood, and I’m certainly not missing our cadre of grey squirrels, which seem to have mysteriously disappeared!
