January 20, 2011-- A fisher comes to visit our compost pile...

A fisher has been coming to visit our compost pile since around Thanksgiving. We first noticed something unusual going on when one of the suet bird feeder cages disappeared from the tree it was nailed to and then a week later, the other one disappeared. Then, when we started to get snow on the ground, we were able to see tracks and eventually identified them as a fisher. Every week or so, this animal comes back and rummages through the compost, ferreting out the meat scraps and bones in the pile. We've seen lots of tracks down near the garden beds, too but hadn't caught sight of the animal until today.
I was brushing my hair, before breakfast and just happened to look out the bathroom window. The fisher was right there, heading to the compost pile which is about twenty feet from the back of the house. I dropped my hairbrush and rushed to grab my camera. The attached video is what we saw this morning. I have contacted the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and they suggest putting a tarp over the pile to keep the varmint out of the scraps. I have my doubts that this will work; I was hoping someone would come trap the thing and relocate it as I don't want our two cats to become a morning snack for this guy!

After lunch, we tracked the fisher in the snow, finding chicken bones, a lobster carcass from our Christmas Eve dinner, part of a rotten cabbage and several coffee filters full of grounds along its trail. We finally lost the tracks in a really brushy area where it was hard to tell footprints from snow blobs that had dropped from the trees. I will keep you posted on any more events with our wild neighbor.