Eastern Fishers do not seem to be preying on Cats in and around Albany NY..............Gray squirrels are their entree of choice........Even Coyotes who do kill cats for food typically reveal only 1 to 2% of their stomach contents containing cat remains...........Roland Kays blogging for the NY Times on his on-going Fisher Study in NY

Do Fishers Really Eat Cats?

By ROLAND KAYS

Scott LaPoint A missing cat poster near a forest preserve in Albany.

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.
Monday, April 4
I hear a lot of people say that fishers — six-to-13-pound members of the weasel family — eat house cats, but I'm not yet 100 percent convinced. As a professional zoologist I have to be careful about accepting animal stories as facts without seeing the evidence myself. I hear stories of mountain lions in the hill towns and even a population of Bigfoots in the Adirondacks. Tell me you saw a deer today and I have no reason to doubt you, but if you make a claim that has never been verified, I want to see the data. Since cats fight each other all the time, and a black cat would look an awful lot like a fisher, witnesses' accounts take us only so far.
Let's review the evidence on this one.
Our research in Albany has shown that fishers certainly have the opportunity to eat cats. They are hunting the woods between subdivisions at night, which is prime cat time. I have followed their tracks through the snow crossing dozens of cat tracks, sometimes even smelling the cat latrines nearby.

Previous Posts

• Albany's Urban Weasels
• Predators Get Snowed in Too
• Following in the Footsteps of a Suburban Fisher
• More Animals Found in Urban Forests
• Tracking Urban Fishers Through Forest and Culvert
• The Silence of the Fishers
• When a Fisher Goes Missing
• Fisher Tracks Through Suburbia

Do fishers have the means to kill a cat? Fishers regularly prey on small and medium-size mammals. Cats are medium-size mammals, so cats fit within fishers' potential prey. Fishers are also excellent tree climbers, effectively cutting off the cat's typical escape route. However, with their claws and canines, cats are better armed than the average woodchuck, and would be a risky foe for a fisher. Killing for a living is dangerous business, and I expect even the toughest fisher would back down from a mean, nasty tomcat. However, I've also met plenty of declawed, cuddly pussycats out there that would seem to be easy prey.
On first thought, a hungry fisher would seem to have the motive to go after a cat. But carnivores don't often make a habit of eating other carnivores. Large predators sometimes kill smaller ones to eliminate the competition, but rarely consume them. One thought is that they don't want to risk contracting diseases from a closely related species. This isn't a rule, but a general trend.
Furthermore, there is another known cat killer on the loose in these same woods, a larger predator with a record of killing cats — the coyote. Most studies of the coyote diet find cats to be an unimportant food item, typically 1 percent to 2 percent of their diet — so they aren't exactly making a living as a serial cat killer. However, cats and cat owners both know that coyotes (not to mention speeding cars) are a risk, and many suggest this is enough reason to keep your cat indoors.
A few years ago a cat owner in nearby Wilton, N.Y., was worried about his missing cat and walked into the woods to find its half-eaten carcass. He had seen a fisher in his neighborhood a few days before, and naturally blamed it for his grief. It doesn't take long for stories like these to take on a life of their own, and before too long I was hearing all about the cat-eating fishers in Wilton. But how do we know it wasn't a coyote? We don't.

Roland Kays Scott LaPoint holding a tranquilized male fisher with a tracking collar.

After my experience in Wilton I started noticing that fishers were taking the blame for cats disappearing all over the Northeast — especially in New Hampshire, for some reason, where they are rumored to claw through screen windows in their cat-chase. I decided to collect some data on the subject. With an undergrad student from SUNY Albany named Paul Gallery, I collected 24 diet samples from suburban fishers. These included scats from Albany and stomachs from fishers caught by a fur trapper who works the areas around Wilton and Saratoga. We washed the samples and compared the remaining fur, feathers, and bones with our museum collections to identify the remains. We found a little bit of everything — except cat. Comparing our results with published studies showed that the suburban fishers ate more gray squirrels than most (20 percent of their diet). There is one study on fisher diet from Massachusetts that recorded two observations of a fisher eating a cat, but found no cat hair or bones in 226 physical diet samples.
Scott LaPoint and I didn't start tracking suburban fishers just to see if they ate cats, but we were certainly curious what we would find. By following fisher tracks in the snow, and investigating their G.P.S. tracking points in person, we have found about 25 kill sites. As with our earlier data, these included a little bit of everything — except cats. We still have a big collection of new scats from this winter that we haven't picked through. Maybe those samples will have the first physical evidence of a fisher eating a cat, and I can finally believe all these frightening tales about cat-eating fishers. Until then, I'll remain a skeptic, and keep blaming the coyote.