Press release from the Environmental Protection Information Center:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has denied listing for the Northern California/Southern Oregon population of Pacific fishers.

Fishers are relatives of mink, otters, and martens. Fishers once roamed West Coast forests from Southern California through British Colubmia, however trapping and habitat destruction have reduced the species to two native populations: one in Southern Oregon/Northern California one in the Southern Sierra Nevada mountains.

Conservation groups including EPIC, the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center and the Center for Biological Diversity first petitioned to list the species in 2000. Consideration of that petition has been repeatedly stalled, with the agency repeatedly evading its responsibilities under the law, forcing litigation by conservation groups.

Following the 2000 listing petition, conservation groups sued the Service to force a determination. In 2004, the Service found that listing was warranted but precluded by higher-priority activities. Following inaction by the Service, in 2010 conservation groups again sued the Service to force the government to complete a final decision. In 2014, the Service returned with a draft decision to list the species. Curiously, two years later the Service reversed its decision, finding that listing was not warranted. Conservation groups again sued and won, with a judge ordering the agency to try again. In 2020, the Service split the larger species into two smaller populations, listing one (Southern Sierra population) as threatened while denying protections to the other (Northern California/Southern Oregon). This decision was, again, overturned, with a settlement to re-consider listing.

“It’s clear that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is doing its best to stop the listing of the Pacific fisher,” said Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Information Center. “The law, however, requires that science drive decisions, not the whims and wishes of the timber industry.”

The Pacific Fisher is under threat from numerous stressors, each compounding the effects of the other: climate change, including larger and more severe wildfires; rodenticide exposure; logging of the mature forest habitats required by the species; and enhanced predation from changes to forest ecosystems.

“This reckless decision ignores the recommendations of professional wildlife biologists,” said KS Wild’s Conservation Director George Sexton. “Widespread use of toxic rodenticide poisons has Fishers dropping dead across the landscape and the Trump Administration just doesn’t seem to care.”

“Fishers are emblems of the Pacific Northwest’s wild forests, and we have to help them avoid extinction and persevere for future generations,” said Tierra Curry, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ll keep working to protect these carnivores and the special places they live.”