Don't know if the book is still available but.

Don't know if the book is still available but.

Just google Ontario Fur Managers Federation-it should come up.
I don't know how to do those link things.

As an aside, Tim Hiller at the Wildlife Ecology Institute in Helena, MT has taken on the task of re-writing Wild Furbearer Management and Conservation in North America. The original version developed by the Ontario MNR and OTA as shown by Boco is from 1987 and it is due for a serious update and inclusion of complex contemporary issues.

I have the honor of having been invited to participate in the project. I will be working on writing part of the Trapper Education portion.

I do not recall the exact timeline, but it will be quite a while before the book/CD are out...

Pete

RossCoak saying that it's all about food, specifically porcupine, I think is simplifying it too much. Having the ability to kill porcupine during the lean winter months I think is the deciding factor in fisher range. Porcupine are not easy to kill without a bullet or a baseball bat. If they're gonna be killed by teeth and claws then they need to be grabbed by the face. Have you ever chased a porcupine and tried to shoot it between the eyes or club it in the face? I have tried many times. I filmed this last year: start the video @ 0:45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVyjb95FNK4 You see what it does when I try to get to its face? Smart critter it knows how to use that armor.

Now, a fisher is about 100x quicker than my lard (This word is unacceptable on Trapperman), and on the bare forest floor that you see in that video it could kill that big porcupine; but soft snow deeper than fishers' legs is going to slow down a fisher considerably. I seen a porcupine protect itself from two GermanShepards just by keeping its face up against a large tree. And once a porcupine gets up a tree it's game over; a porcupine up a tree has no natural enemies (except for maybe a bear swatting it out of the tree), not even fisher can out-maneuver it up there. Also, porcupine can hole up for weeks during freeze or times of deep snow, and are completely protected when denned up they have no enemies (except bear maybe). I do a lot of tracking in the snow when I can, and even though parts of where I trap have high densities of porcupine I rarely see their tracks, they're holed up.

Most porcupine here in the Catskills are >3,000' elevation, where snow gets >3' deep most winters. Porcupine at that elevation here, in winter, have no natural enemies. They live until they descend into the valley roads to lick up the salt residue left roadside by snowplows, and then get squashed by vehicles and eaten by ravens. Up north in AK and the Canadian provinces, if it weren't for marten and wolverine (and maybe lynx?), I think roadside salt would be a porcupine's worst enemy.

The book pages in Boco's photos reiterate a few things that I mentioned in my 1st post on this thread, but also says that both fisher and marten prey on snowshoe hare. What the pages don't say is that hare with snowshoes can outrun fisher in soft snow. I think those authors were analyzing scat during summer months. And I bet that the fisher scat they found that contained marten fur was during summer too. Next time you guys have a marten and a fisher side by side have a look at the feet. Of course the marten feet are smaller, but pound for pound they are much larger. Marten have "snowshoes" fisher don't. And we see this same difference between short-tailed weasel and long-tailed weasel. ST-weasels are northern animals and their feet, ounce for ounce, are much larger vs the feet of LT-weasels, which are southern animals. Bobcat feet vs Lynx feet, the list goes on and on.

So again, ability to kill in winter, in powdery snow, I think that's what defines the northern boundary of fisher range.

We tend to classify many furbearers as either northern or southern. Gulo northern. LT-weasel southern. But I don't think fisher fit into that simple classification. They're the only mustelid that occupy just the central part of North American continent.

BcTomCat I agree fisher is an opportunistic predator/scavenger that will eat all of those animals on your list, and then some. And I like that you capitalized "CARRION" cause I know that during late winter/early spring here every predator here eats deer that starved or froze to death. (Trappers would see a lot more sign of that but come March they're usually done with land trapping so they don't see it.) Carrion is very, very important. It's most abundant when a lot of predators are on the verge of starving to death and is literally the difference between life and death. And we all seen that everything eats gut piles left by hunters during autumn.

But, most of those animals on BcTomCat's list are safe from fisher in deep, soft snow. Snow handicaps fisher.

Mike the only time I'd recommend porcupine as fisher bait is when non-target animals like coon, possum, skunk are clogging up sets (and I don't think you have many coon, possum, skunk as far north as AK). I'd use 1/4 carcass cut lengthwise with quills facing out.

EB where's the 100"?

We see leaves in those tracks; looks like the snow is <1"