Foxes are generally very vocal, and therefore easy to record, while fishers are typically silent in order to better hunt their prey. But those noises are probably misidentified foxes, Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, wrote in the New York Times. Internet forums say a fisher's blood curdling screams, let out in the dead of night, signal that the creature is about to attack. About that screamĪnother unusual characteristic of fisher cats is their piercing screams. (Cats have more to fear from coyotes, owls and cars.) The rumors are likely fueled by the fact that the fisher's range is expanding, so people who have never seen the elusive animals before are now seeing fishers in their yards ( and in some cases, trash cans). "I'm not aware of any, and I don't think there are any cases of fishers attacking humans," Joyce said, adding that while a fisher cat probably wouldn't think twice about eating a house cat if the opportunity presented itself, studies of fisher diets in human-dominated landscapes suggest your cat is probably safe. The fisher cat's reputation as an aggressive hunter has led to unfair and unfounded rumors that fisher cats attack and eat pets and even small children. "A fisher really doesn't have any boundaries in the size of the animal it's willing to attack," Scott McLellan, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, told National Geographic. Researchers tracking lynx with radio collars occasionally found their subjects dead in a snowdrift, with little fisher-size bite marks along their necks and heads, National Geographic reported. In addition to fearlessly hunting porcupines, fishers can also take down lynx - predatory cats that are about twice the size of an average fisher. Although they may look fuzzy and cuddly, these small mammals are fearless hunters. In an unpublished study of 100 fisher skulls collected by hunters, Joyce found that about one in 10 skulls had quills embedded in them, suggesting the tough little creatures had survived at least one unfortunate quilling.įisher cats were once heavily hunted for their warm fur coats. While fishers don't have superpowers making them immune from quilling, they seem to be able to fend off infections from quill injuries that would kill other animals, Montana Public Radio reported. But the quills don't seem to bother the fishers much.įishers also don't seem to care if they get a quill to the face. However, fishers are sloppy eaters and will occasionally swallow a quill or two, Joyce said. Once the prey has died, the fisher will grasp the porcupine's face in its jaws and twist the prickly creature upside down to expose the belly, so the fisher can safely eat without getting quilled. Enough bites to the face, and the porcupine will eventually bleed out and die. As the porcupine tires out, the fisher will snap at the quilled animal's face. Fishers "run circles around to try to exhaust them," Joyce said. Related: Live Science talks 'Cannibalism' with author Bill Schuttīut the fisher's true dietary claim-to-fame is that it's one of the few animals that regularly attack and eat porcupines. The team speculated that the Pennsylvania population of fishers had grown so large so quickly that the animals were competing with each other for food and had grown aggressive toward one another. Of these fishers, 12 had bits of other fishers in their digestive tracts. The study's authors examined the stomach contents of 91 fishers, whose carcasses they had found in Pennsylvania. The animals also eat fruit, reptiles and amphibians, birds and bird eggs, other small mammals, and even each other, according to a 2017 study published in the journal BioOne Complete. In New England, for example, biologists have found that fisher cats seem to enjoy dining on gray squirrels ( Sciurus carolinensis) most often, Northern Woodlands magazine reported. Although "fisher cat" is a bit of a misnomer, it's not because the animals won't eat fish, Joyce said, but because they eat a lot of things and fish isn't usually at the top of the list.
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