November 13, 2005
BUT THEIR CRY IS SPOOKY:
Elusive fisher cats returning to Cape: Small predator stirs commotion (Chase Davis, November 13, 2005, Boston Globe)
On Cape Cod, they have lived like phantoms: ferocious fisher cats, flitting between the trees, feasting on small animals, and piercing the night with blood-curdling howls.Common in Central and Western Massachusetts, the creatures have stalked around the Cape unseen. Some wildlife experts doubted they lived there at all. That is, until Tuesday morning, when Sandwich animal control officers found the first Cape-dwelling fisher cat in decades lying dead along Route 130, near the Massachusetts Military Reservation.
The fisher cat, cousin to the weasel and the wolverine, has slowly expanded its habitat, according to state wildlife experts, joining coyotes as forest-dwelling predators slowly repopulating on the Cape.
The animal found Tuesday was more than 3 feet long, weighed about 12 pounds, and was probably about a year old, according to Dick Turner, a wildlife biologist at the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife office in Bourne.
It had been struck by a car and has been taken to MassWildlife biologists for analysis, Turner said.
''It's a good-sized one," he said. ''It's stirred up a lot of interest."
The nice thing is they control three particular vermin--skunks, cats, and small dogs. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 13, 2005 10:01 AM
The fisher cat, cousin to the weasel . . .
You mean they're part of Ted Kennedy's extended family?
Posted by: Mike Morley at November 13, 2005 11:18 AMVery interesting.
Predator reintroduction is part of the vast conspiracy to establish the pagan religion. The plan has been to reintroduce animal predators to restore pre-human prey-predator population balances.
Traditional human hunter-ecology is to be phased out by incremental inhibitory measures to discourage human hunting and trapping, and, of course, by the scarcity of game birds and animals as a result of competitor predation.
Fishers are tough on all small-game birds and animals, as well as non-game species, particularly the porcupine. The effects of their reintroduction is so extreme that it has been successfully opposed in some jurisdictions.
Posted by: Lou Gots at November 13, 2005 11:43 AMMy wife was sitting in the living room of my sister's place in Colchester (central) CT a couple years ago when she saw what she initially thought was a cat...no maybe a dog... what the hell is that? It was walking past the window of their hold farmhouse on a few acres.
I saw it only fleetingly, but with her description-- and a cable internet connection and some supreme Google skills-- we determined it was a fisher.
They're pretty bizarre creatures. They climb trees, situate themselves backwards and bite the faces off of hapless porcupines who come a calling. Nice!
My sister's cat went missing shortly before this sighting.
Posted by: Brian McKim at November 13, 2005 6:55 PMLou: You would be singing a different tune if your wife was complaining about the rats on stilts that ate her hosta lillies. Your part would be soprano.
I see no down side in large predators. The population would have to be armed. But that is a good thing, an armed society is a polite society. We would have to build city walls, but that is also good.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at November 14, 2005 12:38 AMRobert: I don't like predator reintroduction because it upsets hunter ecology, and I rely on the hunters as the first line of defense of the RKBA.
I don't much hunt anymore--haven't done it for years, except for woodchucks, although my son may get me out for deer this year. However, I acknowlege that there are probably 20 hunters for every NRA member and 50 for every competitive shooter.
If the earth-mother worshippers are successful in supplanting hunter-ecology with animal predator-prey ecology, hoi polloi are going to give up hunting because game will be scarce, and sooner or later the gun-grabbers will come for the competitors and collectors and we will be the only ones left.
This has already happened to some extent with respect to small game in my state because of predator reintroduction.
If you have a bad deer problem, the answer is archery and even crossbow hunting. My state allows bowhunting inside its largest city, and if there is enough space for deer to live, there is enough space to hunt them.
Posted by: Lou Gots at November 14, 2005 8:06 AMSomething tells me that the reintroduction
of varmints such as Fisher Cat's and Coyotes
will do more to re-build support for the hunting
than a bunch of toothless game birds
scurrying around in the woods.
I'm not sure I buy the re-paganization =
"feminization". That "mother-goddess" stuff
is just for health food marketers and such.
How many real pagan cultures have been averse
to hunting?