On the wild side

The screaming starts after nightfall.

The first time Kim Meikle heard it, she thought someone was being murdered or tortured outside her two-story Tyngsborough house on the edge of the forest. She's not ashamed to admit she has called the police about it. It scared her that much.

But Meikle, an animal control officer in nearby Dunstable, doesn't call the police anymore when she hears ''the blood-curdling screams."

Instead she makes sure everyone is in the house: her three cats, her dog, and her 7-year-old son. She wants to protect them, she said, from the fishers living in the forest that grow bolder by the day.

''The first time I ever heard a fisher cat, I had no idea what was happening," said Meikle, using a popular term for this large, elusive, carnivorous member of the weasel family. When Meikle moved into her home a decade ago, she had never heard a fisher screaming before. Now she knows a lot about these creatures. And so do many others. They're turning up from Westford to Worcester, Lowell to the Cape -- even Brookline.

''The Brookline one was certainly an eye-opener," said Trina Moruzzi, a biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Until recently, she said, the fisher was generally believed to be a forest dweller.

But now, like the black bear and the coyote, the fisher has gone suburban. And although wildlife managers don't consider that such a bad thing -- the fisher, after all, had nearly vanished from New England a century ago -- many people are not fans. As it turns out, the fisher has an affinity for house cats.

''They're posting signs all over the place: My cat's missing . . . My cat's missing," said Meikle, who's determined not to let that happen to her three felines. ''My cats do not go outside and never will," she said. ''They're happy being inside."

There are no official efforts to control the population of fishers. Wildlife biologists say the animal has an underserved bad reputation, that people don't even know its name. They recoil when folks call them ''fisher cats," a slang term that has been adopted by some New England sports teams. And they point out that there are many wild animals -- the coyote, the great horned owl, and the fox, for example -- that like to prey on cats.

However, when house cats disappear, people in many areas are often quick to blame the fisher. ''It's become folklore in a way," said Julie Robinson, a wildlife biologist for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. But there is some truth to the legend.

In Boston's northwest suburbs, animal control officers say they get 10 to 20 calls a week from people who have lost their cats.

Kathy Comeau, the animal control officer in Pepperell, said she has had reports from people who have watched fishers walk off with their cats. Mike Harrington, the animal control officer in Westford, said he often finds the remains of pets on the edge of people's property. And in one case last year in Rutland, Vt., wildlife officials came out to capture, and put down, a fisher that was picking off cats in the center of town.

''People were upset because their cats were being taken in broad daylight in the city," said John Hall, a spokesman for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. ''I remember in one instance they had a window down low and the screen removed. A cat was just sitting there in the open window and that was all the fisher needed to take the cat."

It's easy pickings for the fisher, a creature that has been known to tangle with porcupines and win. They're bigger than most cats, and can weigh as much as 20 pounds. They have claws, and can climb trees. They're fast, solitary hunters -- a territorial animal, said Moruzzi, that, like a coyote, fans out into its own area, then defends it from intruders. And most people who have seen them say they don't typically linger very long. The fisher is secretive and, according to some, fearsome.

''They have that long snout and lots of teeth," said Comeau. ''They have like two sets of teeth there. Nasty, nasty, nasty. They're not nice."

But despite these attributes, deforestation and trapping drove the fisher to the brink of extinction in New England in the 1800s. By the turn of the 20th century, wildlife biologists say fishers remained only in pockets of Maine and New York. ''We eliminated its habitat," said Pat Huckery, MassWildlife's northeast district manager, replacing forests with farmland. And as recently as the 1930s, they had all but vanished from their last strongholds in Maine.

Shortly thereafter, however, fishers began staging their comeback. In the early 1940s, as farmland began reverting back to forests, fishers began breeding in greater numbers again, said Mark Stadler, the director of the wildlife division for Maine's Department of Inland Fish and Wildlife. They began moving south, seeking free territory they could claim as their own. In the 1960s, wildlife managers brought about 100 fishers from Maine to Vermont to help restore the species there. And a decade later, Moruzzi said, the fisher was finally starting to reappear in north central and western Massachusetts.

''Historically," she said, ''they were here." But recent reports of fishers in suburban and even urban areas are a departure from the past, Moruzzi said.

It could mean that the population is growing -- the state has no current numbers tabulated on them. Or it could mean that people are simply moving to where the fishers are, making this only the most recent modern tale of man's hesitant and accidental return to nature.

That's what Billerica's animal control officer Dede Murphy said she believes. Murphy didn't begin seeing fishers in big numbers until the construction on Route 3, she said. Ever since then, she said, they're finding more and more fishers.

''I tell everybody since all the destruction of the land -- don't let your cat out," Murphy said. ''A cat is like a rabbit to a fisher cat. Another animal. What are you going to do?"

On this, Meikle agrees. If they want to live on the edge of the woods, she tells her son, they have to respect the forest and the other species that live there. So she puts up with the screaming in the night.