Rhody Gone Wild

The wilds of Rhode Island are getting wilder. The latest creature to cause a stir in the Ocean State is the fisher cat, which doesn’t fish and isn’t a cat but is a particularly vicious member of the weasel family. Sightings have exploded. A fisher bit one woman in Lincoln when she tried to kick it with bare feet. Friends in Kingston have heard their screeching at night and seen them trotting on the tops of stone walls, using them as rural highways to watering holes and easy kills.

Squirrel-heavy neighborhoods that suddenly don’t have any squirrels are a sign that fishers might be lurking around. Same with communities that put up signs for missing cats. They were hunted out of Rhode Island in the early 1700s, but are back with a vengeance.

Coyotes, also suspected in local cat thefts, have adapted quite easily to Rhode Island, even though they never lived in Rhody (or anywhere in the East for that matter) until last century. The absence of wolves in this part of the world gives them room to roam. I’ve heard them baying at night in Matunuck, watched them slink through the woods at Trustom Pond in South Kingstown and even spotted them darting across the bike path in Barrington and East Providence.

South County and other parts of the state are glutted with deer. I never saw one in Barrington until recently. Now I see them every week. A large female bounded between the post office and the middle school around 11 a.m. one day. The next night, when I was jogging at dusk on the bike path, two young deer trotted toward me, pounding the asphalt, only veering off at the last minute.

In recent years, young male black bears have returned to the state in the spring. Moose are prevalent once again in Massachusetts (numbering about 1,000) and friends from Connecticut have reported sightings on the main roads of the Nutmeg State. While no moose have been spied in Rhode Island yet, the great antlered beasts are getting closer to our borderlands. The state has more forested land than it did a century ago, when it was more agrarian. There may not be much elbow room, and even less wiggle room, but there are pockets of habitat that can sustain big creatures – at least as tourists, if not residents. So Bullwinkle’s coming, folks. Bet on it.

Finally, state environmental officials downplay sightings of mountain lions in Rhode Island, citing a lack of any credible evidence. But the true big cat believers are out there. According to the excellent eco RI blog, the last mountain lion in the Ocean State was shot in 1847 in West Greenwich and is preserved at Harvard University. But the mountain lion conspiracy theorists don’t buy it. Many of them insist that a mountain lion was spotted in Matunuck last year. Lending credence to some of their claims, one was killed on a Connecticut road, not far from Rhode Island. So for now the cat people have an edge over the folks who report Bigfoot, alien and Tom Brady sightings in Rhode Island.

What is the wildest thing you have ever seen in Rhode Island?