Lawsuit Launched to Protect West Coast Fishers

Defenders of Wildlife alongside the Center of Biological Diversity and others today notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of their intent to sue over the agency’s denial of Endangered Species Act protections for fishers in northern California and southwestern Oregon. Fishers are relatives of martens and wolverines and are dependent on mature and old-growth forests for their survival.

“The Service is playing politics rather than following its own science, and the fisher is paying the price,” said Deirdre Dlugoleski, an attorney at Defenders of Wildlife's biodiversity law center. “The Service’s denial attempts to ignore the fact that — given serious threats including habitat loss, climate change and rodenticides — the species warrants protection.”  

“For millennia fishers have been top predators in the old forests they call home, but people have driven them to the brink of extinction,” said Chelsea Stewart-Fusek, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re suing because the Fish and Wildlife Service’s repeated refusal to provide Endangered Species Act protections to these beautiful, feisty carnivores is unscientific and indefensible. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is selling off what’s left of their habitat to the highest bidder.”

Fishers once roamed from British Columbia down to Southern California, but their West Coast populations were decimated by fur trapping and logging. Logging continues to destroy the older forests that fishers need to survive. They’re also imperiled by worsening wildfires from human-caused climate change and poisoning by rodenticides.

Just three isolated native fisher populations remain on the West Coast — two in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains and another in Northern California and southwestern Oregon. There are also small, reintroduced populations in the central Sierra Nevada, the southern Oregon Cascades, and in Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula and Cascade mountains.

“The fisher has been forced to endure 26 years of political games, as the Fish and Wildlife Service has desperately tried to avoid protecting the species,” said Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center. “But the law is clear: science, not the timber industry, should guide decisions. So we go to court, again, to demand the agency follow the law.”

The Center and allies first petitioned the Service to protect West Coast fishers under the Endangered Species Act in 2000, leading to a 2004 determination by the agency that the animals should be listed as threatened throughout their range. But the Service delayed protecting them, annually reaffirming their imperiled status for more than a decade until 2016, when the agency abruptly reversed course and denied protection.

“Fishers have it rough out there,” said George Sexton, conservation director at KS Wild. “From rodenticide poisoning to habitat loss from logging and fires, these tenacious critters face serious threats to their survival.”

The groups successfully challenged the 2016 decision and in 2020 the Service granted protections to fishers in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains but nowhere else. In 2022 the groups sued the Service again for its failure to protect fishers throughout their West Coast range. The agency agreed to issue a new decision but again denied protections in 2025.

“It's sad that conservationists keep having to sue the federal government for repeatedly violating its own laws safeguarding imperiled species,” said Bethany Cotton conservation director for Cascadia Wildlands. “Science shows fishers are at risk and warrant the protections of the Endangered Species Act, a wildly popular and successful law.”

Today’s notice was filed on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Environmental Protection Information Center and Cascadia Wildlands.