By BRUCE A. SCRUTON
bscruton@njherald.com
SANDYSTON -- As Charles Kontos opened the trail camera to take out the photo chip and replace batteries, I walked around the area of Stokes State Forest, looking at animal tracks left in the fresh snow.
There, just out of camera range, was a unique set of three footprints.
Since there are no known three-legged animals, it was obvious this mammal's gait put one footprint atop another print. And that type of gait would only apply to otters, weasels, martens and, the subject of Kontos' study -- fishers.
"I think this is a fisher's track," I yelled to Kontos, who had invited me to spend the afternoon with him as he checked his line of cameras and to talk about his study, which has verified there is now a resident population of fishers in New Jersey.
A couple of quick measurements with a tape measure and a close look at an unmelted print verified this was left by a fisher within the past couple of days. (A later check of the pictures taken by that camera confirmed that the area was part of a fisher's normal hunting grounds.)
For the next couple of hours, we trailed the elusive forest creature, seen by relatively few people since the fisher is normally a shy, nocturnal hunter.
"They are really quite wonderful, marvelous animals," said Kontos. While his trail cameras have captured many shots of fishers in Stokes, he has yet to take a picture of his own face-to-face encounter.
The second-largest member of the weasel family -- topped only by the wolverine -- a fisher is a skilled predator and one of the very few animals that can best a porcupine.
In fact, it was the remains of a porcupine along a Stokes trail in the fall of 2006 that led Kontos, a doctorate candidate at Rutgers, to firmly believe that fishers had made a comeback. He set up his first couple of trail cameras and on an October evening, snapped the first known picture of a fisher in New Jersey.
Fishers are long and slender with a bushy tail, similar to a squirrel's tail, that gives them balance as they scamper through treetops. An adult male fisher is about two feet long plus a 13-17-inch tail and weighs as much as 15 pounds. A female is about half that size.
Interestingly, an adult female spends much of her life pregnant. Within a couple of weeks of giving birth in late winter, she will mate. The fertilized eggs, however, will stay dormant until the following winter. A litter of one to four pups is born about 30 days after the eggs reactivate.
Kontos is planning his doctorate thesis on the New Jersey fisher.
"The last time one was seen in New Jersey was back in the 1800s," he said, pulling out a book published in 1907 which claimed the animal was extirpated from the state by lack of habitat and overtrapping.
Even in today's depressed fur market, a fisher pelt can fetch $100, although it is illegal to intentionally trap fishers in New Jersey.
But since he announced that October picture in the New Jersey Herald, Kontos said he has heard from hunters and residents alike who have told tales of seeing a strange, black beast running out of their eyesight.
The fisher's historic range is from northern California to the Pacific Northwest and across Canada to New York and New England.
While the fisher will chase squirrels and porcupines in the treetops, most of its hunting is on the ground.
To kill a porcupine, the fisher will attack the animal's face. In some cases, it will flip the animal on its back and quickly go for the soft, unprotected belly and throat. In other attacks, the fisher will inflict mortal wounds to the porcupine's face and as the animal is dying, then do the flip-attack movement.
Other parts of the fisher's diet include mice, voles, rabbits and other small mammals. Birds and fruits and berries will also be consumed as will carrion, such as a deer carcass.
While there are many tales of fishers greatly reducing a development's cat population, a study in New Hampshire of 1,000 fishers found cat remains in only one stomach.
The afternoon tracking session took us across ridge and valley through a mostly coniferous patch of woods, the preferred habitat of the fisher. It was easy in the fresh snow to see where the animal hopped onto a log to get a clear view of its surroundings and then through a dense patch of undergrowth, probably looking for a mouse.
In a couple of places, the tracks led to the base of a tree and it was easy to picture the animal sniffing for fresh scent of a porcupine or squirrel that climbed aloft.
Because of the range of an adult fisher is so big -- average 10 square miles -- it was probable that other fisher tracks found near another camera location were made by the same animal.
While the tracking didn't provide any skat samples or evidence of a kill, Kontos said, "This has been a very fruitful afternoon. We got to track one, at least."
Then, as he sat in his vehicle looking at photos downloaded from the camera onto a laptop computer, he grew more excited. "Wow, look at these. He was out in the daytime, too. Wow."
