We have previously reported that our friend Roland Kays of the New York State Museum has spent this Winter studying the behavior of Fishers in urban and wild habitat in the Albany, NY region..............Interesting findings by Roland and his team is that Fishers and other small animals knowingly make use of culverts to avoid car collisions...............that one encounters many more animals of all species closer into suburbia than you do in the woodlands around Albany.......This said, Fishers do their utmost to avoid open areas around suburban housing..........They skirt the edges of woodlands in their hunting forays..............They make use of the what many would think are minute islands of vegetation to traverse around and across their territories

The fisher study in the suburban Albany, NY Region

By ROLAND KAYS

Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, writes from Albany, where he is comparing the behavior of fishers in urban and wild settings. A map showing one month of movement of Gary the fisher in upstate New York. A red star shows where he was hit by a car in Schenectady.
Gary(Roland's name or this particular Fisher) had traversed over 330 kilometers (205 miles) in one month, moving through Vorheesville, over to Altamont, down to the foothills of the Catskills near the town of Rensselaerville, and then back up to the edge of Interstate 88 by Duanesburg. No wonder we couldn't find his pinger as we drove and hiked around Guilderland! This movement is much different from that of any other animal we have studied, and shows that Gary was dispersing, or looking for a new territory of his own. He crossed many dozens of roads in his wanderings —
Scott and I will go visit each of these to see if he might have used culverts to safely cross under, rather than over, the road. I expect most were not culvert-assisted crossings. Dispersal is a dangerous time for wild animals as the landscape is all new to them. Unlike Phineas the fisher moving through his familiar home range, Gary probably didn't know where the good places were to cross the road as he wandered, and this eventually cost him his life.
Leroy first showed us how fishers search out culverts to cross roads; Phineas showed us they can even cross interstates and hunt the patches of woods within cloverleaf interchanges; Zissou showed us that a female fisher can survive in just one square kilometer of suburban forest; and Gary showed us how dangerous dispersing can be. Now Maurice showed us that fishers can use even the patches of woods between golf fairways for hunting.

GPS data showing how Maurice the fisher hunted the small patches of woods between fairways on a suburban golf course.

 One remarkable thing from these data is that they show how Klause sticks to the forest and does not move through the neighborhood itself. There are two outliers that look like he jumps into a yard for a second, but these are probably just bad GPS fixes, since the next moment he's back in the woods. This is typical of other fishers we've collared as well; they live in suburbia, but stay in the woods. They will hunt right along the edge of someone's backyard, but they very rarely walk out into the open of the suburban grass and concrete.

numbers are in:

We found higher diversity and overall higher activity of animals in our camera traps set in urban forests than in those out in the wild areas. The objective of this study was to compare the potential prey communities that fishers might encounter in these two environments. Could fishers be lured into these areas by abundant prey? Now we know that, yes, this could be part of the explanation (i.e. hypothesis not rejected).

Roland  Joseph Chase setting up a camera trap.

A Venn diagram showing the species detected by our camera trap survey in wild and natural forests.

Carnivores require larger areas to survive than herbivores. This has traditionally kept carnivores out of urban environments because the remaining forest fragments simply weren't large enough to support them. Phineas's data shows the fisher's solution to this problem: link multiple small forest fragments together with a series of corridors. Using tubes under roads is a critical adaptation to help fishers use these disjunct forests without getting hit by cars.
 I found  tracks in the snow going through culverts at three of these, and over the road at the fourth. Other animals were using these same strips of natural habitat as movement corridors, but were not able to fit through the small drainage culverts. Deer and coyote tracks at these places showed that these animals had to risk their lives to cross over the road, while Phineas and his fisher friends take the safer low road underneath.
He actually crosses Interstate 87 (aka the Northway) — not once, but twice. I went to this site today and, surprise surprise, there is a small drainage culvert under the interstate. I also found abundant tracks from rabbits and squirrels, fishers' favorite prey. I've gotten used to thinking of fishers hunting suburban forest fragments, but am shocked to find that they are also using this type of roadside habitat. He is going to where the prey are most abundant, like the red-tailed hawks I often see from the highway, but he is using culverts rather than wings to get from one strip to the other.
Phineas crosses the on/off ramps to hunt in the forest of a highway cloverleaf interchange. This was the final stop on my field reconnaissance today. As rush-hour traffic whizzed by I walked down the sidewalk of Central Avenue, surreptitiously strapped on my snowshoes, and trotted into this little patch of woods (about five acres). Phineas's tracks were all over the place. They show how he dug into the snow after mice, ran up trees after squirrels, and tunneled down into a cattail marsh after something (rabbits? muskrats?). His tracks led me to two dry culverts he used to get underneath the busy on and off ramps.

At one point his tracks ran up a giant mountain of snow thrown by the highway plows to the very edge of the interstate. The GPS data says he was here at 11:40 p.m. I wonder if he could see over the six lanes of highway to the small patch of forest in the opposite cloverleaf? Did he consider making a break for it? The tracks show that he ran back down the snow into the small bit of forest, maybe looking for another tube that would take him to the other