What is the difference between a fisher and a wolverine

Fishers are what biologists call mesopredators, or middle predators. That means they're a link below apex, or top, predators in the food chain. Adult females weigh about 4 pounds 1. Full-grown males can be nearly four feet 1. Fierce and lithe, fishers can pursue prey into tight spaces like underground tunnels or the passages some creatures create beneath winter snow.

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. Individual remains from , years ago, show no significant anatomical differences from modern day fishers.

Fishers are meso predators who defend and scent mark territories of about three square miles in summer, and five in winter.

They prefer mature conifer forests with good cover, large trees and fallen logs with hollows for denning. Fishers may also den under bushes or in crevices. Fisher territories often overlap, and like cats, are frequently patrolled using shared, common routes. Male fishers have slightly larger territories, which overlap female territories, making it easier to find females for mating. Fishers are seasonally brown to dark brown to mottled in summer, with moulting between summer and winter.

Male fishers average three to four feet long, and can reach 8 to 13 pounds, females about half that. Fishers have small round ears to prevent heat loss, and broad, blackish five-toed feet featuring retractable claws, which act as snowshoes. Their ankles have a rotating capability of degrees, which makes them very nimble in trees, even allowing them to run down trees head first. Their rear foot pads have a central scent gland, which may assist in marking territories, and in finding other fishers during mating season.

Studies of fisher stomach contents do not commonly find domestic cats, but porcupine, snowshoe hare, wild turkey and smaller rodents are more likely prey. Fishers also eat some greens, insects, nuts and berries and will scavenge dead animals. One surprising find from a study in Maine led by Scott McKlellan, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, indicate that fishers will occasionally attack the much larger Canadian lynx, often in snowy weather, when the lynx may be taken by surprise, such as laying out a storm.

Tracks in the snow, and the distance between canine punctures found post mortem on the lynx head, throat and neck tell the story. It appears that the fisher seizes the lynx and tenaciously holds on until the cat suffocates. Surprisingly, the victims were not adult lynx weakened by starvation, as there were sufficient numbers of their favored prey, snowshoe hare, in lynx habitat at the time, and the lynx remains did not show anatomical signs of starvation.

Fishers appear to have less luck with bobcats, and often end up as their prey. Male fishers have little to do with females, except during mating season. The female will again go into estrus in April or May, a couple of weeks after giving birth, thus starting the cycle anew. Fishers have been trapped out and extirpated from many regions more than once, as the sale value of pelts rose and fell. Fishers are on a strong comeback in New England, maybe due in part to the increase in porcupines there, an important prey animal.

The fisher and marten trapping season in the Adirondacks is in November. I hope non-target animals have their calendars marked. They've been rehabbing and releasing wild animals for over 45 years, specialize in predators, keep wolves as the cornerstone of their educational program, and have lived in the Adirondacks for the past 20 years. The Adirondack Wildlife Refuge became a non-profit about 10 years ago. Visit www. Once while birding midday along RR tracks in Maine, my friend and I happened upon a poor porcupine standing in the middle of the tracks.

He was breathing and moving slightly, but the entire front of his snout, eyes, and skull were missing. At first we suspected he had been hit by a train wheel, but saw no signs of this on the tracks. So our next guess was an interrupted attack by a fisher. We had no humane way to dispatch the animal, so left him where he was and hoped the fisher would return as soon as we left and finished the job.

Nature is often not pretty. Boreas, you never even saw a fisher? We suspect the fisher saw us and took off as we approached, but was waiting nearby. My friend had been a trapper and knew about fisher than I did. He had heard that is how they attack porkys. Made sense to me. I have only seen 3 fisher in my life.

I did get a night photo of one on a game camera I have behind my garage near a brook. Last year my trail cam in Edinburg caught the briefest glimpse of a fisher, this year one hung around a bit longer for a better look at it. It would have been difficult for the much larger fisher to follow. The next footage was of a fisher with a hold on a woodchuck. The woodchuck was letting out wails. I could not watch that had to tune out…. If you want to see a fisher attacking, check out you tube, Siamese Pond Trail one has a gray fox pinned when some hikers interrupt his meal.

Amazing video. I had one walking up a game trail, last hunting season, toward me. When he see me, he jumped up onto the side of a tree and hissed, turned and ran off. I have seen several over the years, that was the first one with any aggression shown. I get them all the time on trail cameras. Great Horned Owls are a significant predator for skunks and rabbits, which are pretty similar in size and weight to a cat. Although an owl and most raptors may prefer to eat its kill in a tree, it will happily eat it on the ground after expending the energy to kill it.

They are often in competition for food with foxes, bobcats, lynx, coyotes, wolverines, American martens and weasels. Helpful tips. Why is a wolverine called a Wolverine? What type of animal is a wolverine?

What do you call a baby Wolverine? Are Wolverines mustelids? What is the largest type of weasel? How big can Wolverines get? Are fishers and wolverines related? What do fishers look like? Many people who have attended my presentations about fishers come with some very standard misconceptions about this animal.

I also have had people tell me that they were afraid to cross paths with a fisher as they had heard that the animal attacks people by jumping at their face and going for their eyes, which is absolutely unheard of.

Native to North America, the fisher is one of the larger members of the Mustelidae, or weasel, family, and is related to mink, otters, badgers and wolverines. Due to their shy, elusive and solitary lifestyle, fishers have not been seen by most people, though the animals live in forested regions, and areas with abundant trees that surround both suburban and urban areas throughout the state.

Sporting an elongated body and short legs, rounded ears, small eyes and a pointed snout, the average male fisher weighs between 8 and 15 pounds, and is around 3 feet long from nose to tail tip. Females are smaller at about 4 to 6 pounds and 2 feet long, and their fur is often darker and more luxurious than the males.