How does a fisher kill a porcupine

You can feel their energy as they go from brush piles to a fallen tree, or lope over to investigate a hollow tree and then go straight to a spot where there are sometimes porkies. Just had my second Fisher sighting this morning, around am, in my yard. I live in a rural area surrounded by heavy woodland.

The first time was several years ago when I saw this large black head with tiny ears poking out if the hedgerow in my yard. I had no idea what it was, so I called my husband, who knew immediately what it was. This morning, as I opened my side door, I saw the Fisher come out of the heavy bush on the side of the road, where it proceeded to lope across.

Was quite an impressive site. I just saw one big fisher in my pond this spring in south central Virginia. At first I thought it was a beaver or otter but no mistaken identity by its height, distinctive hump and fluffy tail when it emerged from the water and shook its fur dry!

It was huge!! About a foot or more high hump and 30 inches long nose to tail. Loved the Bronx fisher!! I have heard them scream working a a fresh water marsh invoking terror to nesting geese and ducks.

I assume raiding eggs while the females are sitting on them. They are no match for this opportunistic feeder. Have seen fishers crossing my yard and the road here around Mansfield Hollow Lake. Have also heard a horrible scream a few times and was told it was a fisher cat, but it could also be the fox families that live here. Glad to see all the wildlife around here. There was even a moose photographed here two years ago. Saw three osprey last night, too.

I see no benefit in repopulating fishers. They are vicious killers who I believe have killed more pet cats than porcupines. I would be extremely happy if they were to become rare and endangered! I know they are here in the Ohoi Valley. I have seen three personally in the last 4 years and one on a game cam last year. Enjoyed the article, I have been told that porcupines can scream, maybe when a fisher is chasing them? In my great many years spent outdoors in NY and southern Canada, I have seen MANY Fishers, even called them in while turkey hunting, but have never had the experience of hearing one scream.

After they chase down hares and squirrels, they dispatch them with a quick bite to the back of the neck. Sharp, partially retractable claws let fishers scale trees like a cat. And their hind paws can rotate nearly degrees, allowing them to come back down a trunk headfirst. This last trick is what makes fishers one of the few predators that can take down a porcupine. With a nearly impenetrable coat of 30, quills, each tipped with a microscopic barb that sticks in flesh like a whaling harpoon, porcupines don't have much to fear from predators large or small.

But every defense has its weakness. No head, no porcupine. To avoid the most dangerous parts of a porcupine—the neck, back, and tail—a fisher dances circles around its prey. Each time the low-to-the-ground fisher gets a look at the porcupine's face, it lunges forward and strikes.

Repeated bites to the face disorient the victim, cause bleeding, and eventually send it into shock. The fisher then rolls the porcupine over and starts eating through its stomach, neatly skinning the kill to avoid the still dangerous quills.

The process is neither quick—Roze says the lethal dance alone takes 30 minutes to an hour—nor pretty. Often the fisher scalps the porcupine in the process. Roze and a colleague once happened upon a fisher moments after a kill and found a porcupine carcass completely beheaded.

When a porcupine is cornered, it will sometimes jam its vulnerable head against the base of a tree. Any other predator would be at an impasse, facing a wall of quills on every side. But the fisher's special ankles mean it can hop on the trunk and start attacking from above. As fishers have been pushing back East, they've also been getting bigger. LaPoint's research evaluated specimens from across the U.

This is what biologists call directional selection. In this case, a random mutation of genes produces a few fishers with slightly larger skulls. That may allow them to take down their prey more efficiently or target larger prey.

Over time, as the bigger-skulled fishers keep passing on their genes, the new genes become the norm. According to one of LaPoint's co-authors, Roland Kays , the lab director at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and a professor at North Carolina State University, "Finding that fishers are evolving a larger body size and that they're eating larger prey really shows that they're starting to move into the larger predator space.

Around the same time that fishers were disappearing, aggressive antipredator campaigns sought to kill off wolves and mountain lions. As this study and others illustrate, we're still trying to understand the effects.

Kays says the absence of apex predators—and the effect it's had on fisher size and range—constitutes an interesting ecological phenomenon. For a fisher, that would mean avoiding risky places like clearings or foraging only when it knows that apex predators won't be around. But no predators means no pressure—or competition.

Whether they're roaming around the Bronx or figuring out ways to cross highways, fishers are thriving in part because they're highly adaptable. Unlike longer-legged predators, fishers are the same height as porcupines and are able to attack them face to face. Quills guarding its face from above are useless against attackers coming from below. The fisher is weasel-shaped, long and low to the ground, which gives it a clear advantage over the porcupine. It rapidly strikes the face of the porcupine in order to injure its prey.

Often, the attack can take over a half an hour until the fisher can inflict a lethal bite. A porcupine spends most of its time in trees, where it is safe from terrestrial assailants. This tactic may work for many predators, but it is useless against the fisher. This long, sleek creature will use its supreme arboreal abilities to chase a porcupine up a tree and wear down its prey before attacking. Like a squirrel, a fisher can climb a tree and then swivel around and descend head first into the porcupine, forcing it to the ground.

Once on the ground, the agile fisher now has the advantage over its sluggish prey. The attack usually ensues in a circle, as the porcupine is constantly trying to turn its quills towards the fisher in order to shield its face. A porcupine will whip its tail back and forth, trying to land a blow and fend off the attacking predator. Though a fisher is not completely immune to a porcupine quill, it is able to fend off serious infections from quill injuries that would otherwise kill most animals.