This is Portsmouth?

I guess there are all kinds of freshwater wetlands.  I'm pretty ignorant of the differences.  A swamp, I learned, is a freshwater wetland covered by a tree canopy.  So not all wetlands are swamps.  Huh!  Who knew?  I thought they were all swamps.  There are sloughs and fens and mires and bogs and marshes.  I'm sure I'm leaving out some others.

So I don't know what the precisely proper term for this place is, but it's inside the city limits of Portsmouth.  It's part of a wetlands right next to the postal facility on Heritage Ave., and it's pretty wild.  I heard a strange-sounding bird call while I was getting this shot.  I think it was a woodpecker.  The surrounding mire is studded with snags.

I drive down nearby Banfield Road a lot.  One time I saw an animal run across the road ahead of me there, and at first I thought it was a cat, but it was too large, and its tail was too long and bushy, and it ran with a strange hopping lope.  It wasn't a cat.  I suspected it was either an otter or a fisher, so later I looked for YouTube videos to find ones featuring those animals in motion.  I found a few and decided that most likely the animal was a fisher because their gait matches what I saw, and the fisher's tail is decidedly bushier than an otter's.  That also corresponded to the animal I saw, which definitely had a bushy tail.

Some people worry about their cats being taken by fishers.  In 1979, NH Fish and Game did a study of the stomach contents of a thousand fishers trapped by hunters and found cat hairs in the stomach of only one.  Fishers are probably less a threat than cat owners fear.  Domestic cats are more of a threat to wildlife than wildlife is to them.

I won't own a cat again because I don't like to keep cats indoors.  I used to keep outdoors cats as pets.  I think that, by and large, they live happier lives when allowed outdoors, but I don't want to be responsible for even more environmental havoc than I am already.  The domesticated cat is an ecological calamity wherever it runs free.

A couple of months before my sighting of the fisher on Banfield, one of my colleagues was coming to work the same way I do, and, when she got to work, she reported seeing a moose on Ocean Road.

Portsmouth can be a wild place!