Robert Beaudry, of West Greenwich, trapped a fisher two weeks ago after one bit his dog, Holly. The dog recovered, and the fisher was relocated elsewhere by environment officers.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

WEST GREENWICH — For two weeks, Darlene DiRocco carried an aluminum baseball bat as she walked Banks, her golden retriever.

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The elementary school teacher is no Barry Bonds; she’s never played baseball. But she was prepared to take a mighty swing if that fisher — a weasel-like animal that she says tried to bite Banks — ever showed up again.

“If it gets on my dog’s back, I think I would whack it off,” she says. “I don’t think I would kill it, but I would hurt it.”

Fortunately for DiRocco, she never had to. A neighbor caught what she believes is the delinquent animal, and someone from the state’s Department of Environmental Management whisked it away.

Often referred to as “fisher cats,” the normally secretive animals had been absent from the state for 200 years. But two dog attacks in West Greenwich last month confirm what Rhode Island wildlife biologists have been noticing for the past few years: That fishers are back — and thriving.

It’s a good thing, experts say.

“Here’s a species that’s a success story, in the way it was expatriated from the state for a couple of centuries,” says Charlie Brown, a DEM wildlife biologist, “and basically on its own accord, it’s come back to Rhode Island.”

Though many locals call them fisher cats, the animals are neither prolific fish-eaters nor part of the cat family. They are Mustelids, which also include weasels, ferrets and wolverines. It is said they got the fisher cat label from the French word fitchet, used to describe a European polecat, another Mustelid.

Brown says fishers retreated to northern New England after humans started turning forests into farmland and towns. Starting about 20 years ago, fishers began reappearing as forests replaced abandoned farmland. He says he has no idea how many fishers live in the state, but since they have few, if any, natural predators here, they are here to stay. He thinks they are primarily living in the rural sections of Washington, Kent and Providence counties.

That’s not exactly what DiRocco wants to hear. She says that on July 20, while she was walking her dog on Wickaboxet Drive near her home, a fisher came out of the woods and ran at Banks, trying to claw and bite him.

She yanked Banks’ leash and the two sprinted to their house. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw the fisher chasing them, but it finally retreated.

DiRocco says she and her daughter are “definitely afraid” of another fisher encounter, and she wishes the animals would stay away, though she understands why they come to residential areas.

“It’s the same reason why the deer are eating all my plants,” she says. “Can I blame them? No. We’re taking their home. I am sympathetic to that point. But I wish [the fisher] wouldn’t go after my dog.”

She pauses.

“Couldn’t it just eat mice?”

NEW ENGLAND wildlife biologists have heard all sorts of urban myths about fishers.

One legend says a group of fishers can take down a fully grown deer. Another says they have superhuman powers, able to tear down cabin doors in their quest for food. Trina L. Moruzzi, a biologist for Massachusetts’ Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, says she’s even heard a particularly wild one about of a fisher attacking a small child.

Biologists discount those stories.

“There’s a certain mystique about them,” says Brown, the DEM biologist. He says he thinks people get an image in their head that is “greatly exaggerated.”

He adds: “And wrong.”

One story that is true is that fishers are one of the few animals that know how to successfully attack a porcupine. They usually maul or bite the porcupine in the face before flipping it on its back and feasting on its stomach.

This is what is known about fishers: They are usually 3 to 4 feet long. Males usually weigh as much as 16 pounds, while females tend to be much smaller, weighing up to 6 pounds. They have dark brown fur, with patches of black and gray. Their bushy tails make up a third of their length. They are excellent climbers, though they hunt mostly on ground.

With their quickness, agility and sharp claws and fang-like teeth, the normally solitary animals usually prey on small mammals such as squirrels, mice and porcupines. Thomas P. Husband, a wildlife professor at the University of Rhode Island, says fishers have also been known to snack on domestic cats, though felines aren’t a mainstay of their diet. Husband says a fisher lives in his South Kingstown neighborhood, and he suspects it’s the culprit behind the missing-cat signs he’s seen lately.

“Coyotes have gotten a bad rap for taking out pets,” he says. “I think fishers are doing a lot of this.”

But he’s never heard of one taking on a dog, much less one the size of a golden retriever. When told of the West Greenwich attacks, he replied: “That’s neat.” (He clarified his apparent glee, saying that only a wildlife biologist would respond like that.)

Husband and Brown are at a loss as to why a fisher might have confronted the dogs. They suggest that the dogs might have provoked the fisher, or that the fisher might have been rabid.

Fishers are a protected species, meaning they can only be trapped with a permit during the trapping season, which is in December this year. Their pelts — which have recently been the rage in Europe, Brown says — fetch up to $70 a pelt, about six times more than a mink pelt. Brown says trappers reported 83 fishers caught last year, up from 48 in 2005. The DEM allowed trapping starting in 2000, when it felt that there was a healthy enough fisher population to sustain the practice, Brown says.

The biologists say people with fishers in their neighborhoods have no reason to fear a human attack. As for pets, Brown urges people to use common sense.

“If you’re going to keep your cats out, leave them out at night, it might be reasonable to expect some problems,” he says.

Even those who think they’ve been victimized by fishers have mixed feelings.

Two of DiRocco’s neighbors, Kerry and Robert Beaudry, actually trapped a fisher two weeks after seeing one viciously bite their 80-pound German shepherd, Holly, in the jaw. Baiting it with a pound of beaver meat one evening, Robert arrived home the next afternoon to find it in the cage — playing on its back and making a purring sound.

“It looked kind of cute and cuddly,” he says. “I looked over at it and said, I couldn’t leave it in there for any amount of time.”

Then he approached the cage, and it suddenly started rattling the cage and snarling, reminding him of the bite that left the now-healed Holly with a bloodied jaw. Still, the Beaudrys let the DEM official relocate the fisher, because Kerry says they would have felt bad about killing it. (When asked, DEM spokeswoman Stephanie Powell says the department has no record of what it did with the fisher, which it considers a non-rabid species. But she adds the department most likely would have moved it “far enough away so it would not get back to that neighborhood.”)

Fred and Laura Meyerson, both assistant professors of natural resources science at the URI, believe a fisher living in woods behind their house ate their cat, Parker Posey Party Girl, last November.

“It’s sad,” says Laura, as Fred recounts adopting Posey as a kitten, when the two were graduate students at Yale University several years ago.

But the couple, who now have two small Chihuahua mutts they keep a close eye on, say that Posey’s death was almost apt.

“She was a very fierce predator,” Laura says. “But in a way, if you live by predation, then you deserve to die by predation.”

swoo@projo.com