Weaseling Around Eastern Connecticut

by Ev Newton

Last fall, my good neighbor Bob, who drives a Buick, was inspired to consider purchasing a used E46 M3. He approached me for my thoughts on the 3-year old car, and I realized that, although he had ridden in mine on a couple of occasions, he really had no detailed idea what he was getting into. I offered him a more revealing ride in mine and a chance to drive it himself. After a short orientation, I pointed him toward a sweet and winding road in Glastonbury, where people are not known to lurk. He drove conservatively, as I expected. At the top of the wooded hill, I took the wheel to show him what the car was capable of (or, at least, what it was capable of with me driving). Knowing that the road we had just traveled was empty, I reversed direction and told Bob to buckle in tight and hold on.

I quickly ran the engine up near redline in first, then eased off for a sharp right-hand curve, expecting to go to second as soon as the sightline cleared. As I apexed, however, I was forced onto the binders, coming to a stop fifty feet short of something I had never seen before and that few people in eastern Connecticut have ever seen. Standing a foot-and-a-half high on his hind legs in the middle of the road was a weasel-looking critter, bushy-tailed, with a lustrous and lush coat of dark reddish brown to black fur. The noise of the engine had obviously startled him, and the look on his snout bespoke something akin to, “Now what?” We stared each other down for a few beats before he bolted for the roadside woods.

The critter, I later learned from one of my environmentalist/tree-hugger friends, was a fisher, sometimes referred to in these parts as a “fisher-cat” and in more literate circles as Martes pennati. Despite their feline nickname, they are not cats at all, but full-fledged members of the weasel or mustelidae family. Although they have been breeding for the past few years in western Connecticut, they have rarely been seen east of the Connecticut River. According to the state DEP (thank you), they are hunters who inhabit large tracts of coniferous or mixed hardwood and softwood forests, with males reaching up to 10 pounds, females 6 pounds. Males (one of which we likely saw) are 36 to 40 inches long. Fishers eat squirrels, mice, carrion, fruit, birds and frogs but, oddly enough, no fish. They are plentiful from southeastern Alaska to Hudson Bay and have been seen in the Rocky Mountains, California’s Sierra Nevadas and some northern U.S. regions, now including Glastonbury, Connecticut.

Well, Bob got over his fascination with owning a car that would have been somewhat out of character for him, and he still drives his Buick to work. And I still drive too fast on back roads. But I am just a little more alert to the possibility of finding something astounding just around the next bend.