The recent Bronx fisher was photographed at dawn by Derek Lenart, a NYC Police officer who works the night shift. Our GPS tracking study showed how suburban animals use movement corridors to move between favorite hunting grounds, skirting around neighborhoods to find the next small patch of woods. Camera trap surveys suggest they may be more common suburban Albany than nearby wildlands, possibly because of the abundant squirrel populations. After repopulating wild and rural forests, they began colonizing upstate suburban forests about a decade ago, and seem to be doing quite well there. Their population recovered, slowly at first, but is now booming across the Northeast, even with trapping seasons reinstated. Trapping pressure only increased over the centuries, leaving a handful of fishers surviving in the Adirondacks and other wilderness areas when trapping was banned in the 1930’s. Their love of tubes and rodents should also make them keen ratters, although no fisher has ever lived so close to so many rats as our recent Bronx visitor.įishers lived in Manhattan when the island was first settled, but were one of the first to disappear due to the high prices fetched by their fur. Their long skinny build also makes fishers keen tunnel users, which helps them crawl through drainage culverts to cross under roads and avoid becoming road-kill. NYPD officer Derek Lenart captured this photograph of a fisher walking down a Bronx sidewalk at dawn on 15 April 2014, producing the first ever evidence of the species living in New York City.
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