Fisher Climbs Into Stand With Hunter

One New York hunter experienced an opening day that he won't soon forget.

At around 6 a.m., on opening day of firearm season, Tucker Money, a 35-year-old Princeton, Massachusetts, resident, climbed into a stand on his father's property in Ontario County, New York. By about 9 a.m., Money was thinking about climbing down .

Money told Syracuse.com, I was freezing. I decided to have one last look around to see if there were any deer, he said.

Then he noticed a fisher running toward his treestand. Money pulled out his cell phone and began filming.

He looked like he knew I was there, he said. It was circling around my tree, sniffing my footprints. And then he decided to climb my tree.

With only a few feet between them, the Fisher stared at Money and then quickly descended the tree and scampered away.

It was like he smelled something from me, he said. Maybe it was something that was on my boots from the house.

But, the excitement wasn't over for Money. After taking a quick break for lunch, he returned and managed to tag a nice 11-point buck.

It was definitely the best opening day I've ever had, and I've been hunting for a while, he said.

Despite its name, the fisher seldom eats fish. Its name may have originated from the French word fichet, which referred to the pelt of a European polecat.

According to Sciencedaily.com, the fisher's primary prey include hares, rabbits, squirrels, mice, shrews and porcupines.

While fishers and mountain lions both kill and eat porcupines, the fisher is the only predator to have specialized a killing technique. It will repeatedly bite and scratch at the porcupine's face until it bleeds to death.

Because most of the porcupine is covered in quills, the fisher then eats the porcupine by flipping the dead animal over.

The fisher is found from the Sierra Nevada in California to the Appalachians in West Virginia and north to New England (where it is often called a fisher cat), as well as in southern Alaska and across most of Canada.

Low numbers of fishers are present in the Rocky Mountains, where most populations are the result of reintroductions.

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