A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
fisher
The fisher is a large dark member of the weasel family, roughly the size of a house cat with a long body and a bushy tail, living in mature forest across Canada and the northern United States. It is one of the few animals that regularly hunts porcupines, working around to the face and returning repeatedly. It climbs well, can rotate its hind feet to come down a trunk head-first, and hunts on the ground and in the canopy.
Etymology
The fisher does not fish. The name is thought to come from the European polecat, an animal early Dutch and French settlers knew well and thought this one resembled: the pelt was fitch in English, fisse in colonial Dutch, and fiche or fichet in French. English speakers heard something familiar in it and settled on a word that describes a trade rather than an animal. Several Indigenous names for it are older and better, including pekan from Abenaki, which survives in the scientific name.
Notes
Buffon described the animal in 1765 and called it a pekan. Thomas Pennant examined the same specimen six years later, unaware of the earlier description, and called it a fisher. The scientific name now carries both: The genus is Pekania and the species honors Pennant.