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Summary: How to Track Fishers in this free hunting video.
Views: 1,366 | Tags: field, hunting, tracking, animals, guide, outdoors, mammals, wild, forest, animal tracking
About the Expert
Valerie and Nick Wisniewski Valerie Wisniewski began her life-long study of nature accompanying her father in the forests of Arkansas. She continued her training as a fifteen-year studen... read more
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Questions & AnswersHi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We would like to show you how to identify fisher tracks in the wild and for information, you can check our website www.walnuthilltracking.com. The fisher is a large member of the weasel family and like other members of the weasel family; it has 5 toes that register in the track on both the hind foot and the front foot. The fisher tends to have bulbous toes and the claws sometime do register and sometimes the don’t. It has very well developed sharp claws for grasping and holding prey. The heel pad has a c-shape to it which helps differentiate between other families of animals and weasels. One of the most common patterns of the fisher is what we called a 3-4 bound. Some people to refer to it as a lope. It is somewhat related to a gallop or a lope. It is highly variable and the way the fisher does it like other weasels, the fisher can be very erratic. It is a highly energetic animal as it moves around the landscape. Now what we have here are two groups of actually not 3 prints but 4 prints. Now what happens is the fisher is moving along. A front and a front will hit the ground and then a hind, and then a hind. In this case, the hind has landed on top of another front leaving a pattern of three. The fisher has very variable distances in between and when we measure the stride of a fisher in this kind of gait, we measure what is called an intergroup length or the space in between the groups. So you will measure from the trailing edge of one group to the leading edge of another group. In this particular case, it is just under 20 inches. Fisher can have a stride in this kind of pattern up to 30 inches and the only other animal that you could possibly confuse it with might be the river otter but the river otter does not have as long strides as the fisher and the trail width of the river otter is much wider. The fisher has a more narrow trail; usually from somewhere around 3 to 5 inches. In this case, it shows us a little less than 4 inches. So that fairly narrow 3-4 bound and the fairly long stride tells us that this is fisher.
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