Saving Fishers

Despite their name fishers don't eat fish or live by the ocean. These shy, plush-furred members of the weasel family inhabit mature forests and munch on everything from birds to small mammals to fruit. In fact, fishers are the only animal tough and clever enough to prey regularly on porcupines — no easy feat.

Background

In the western United States, fishers once roamed throughout the mature and old-growth forests of the northern Rockies and from the Pacific Northwest to the southern Sierra Nevada. Today populations have declined significantly, leaving only tiny, disconnected islands in each region.

Due to historical trapping, logging, and development in the West Coast’s mature and old-growth forests, Pacific fishers —  those on the West Coast — are now in danger of extinction. Although Pacific fisher trapping was outlawed in the 1940s, logging and development have decimated the large blocks of forest the species needs to thrive. Pacific fishers once roamed forests from British Columbia to Southern California but now are limited to two small native populations in the southern Sierra Nevada, plus another in Northern California and southwestern Oregon. There are also small, reintroduced populations in the central Sierra Nevada, the southern Oregon Cascades, and Washington state (on the Olympic Peninsula, on Mt. Rainier, and in the North Cascades). The Northern California-southwestern Oregon population is the largest remaining one, but it’s severely threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation caused by logging and high-severity fire.

And in the northern Rockies,  habitat loss and trapping has limited fishers to the border of northern Idaho and Montana.

Our Campaign

To help save Pacific fishers from extinction, in 1994 the Biodiversity Legal Foundation — later absorbed by the Center — first petitioned protect them under the federal Endangered Species Act. With three ally groups, we filed a second petition in 2000. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found they warranted protection in 2004 — but that such protection was “precluded” by listing of other species. Following Center litigation in 2010, the agency finally proposed listing fishers in 2014 but reversed course in 2016, denying protection. Represented by Earthjustice, the Center and allies sued again, and the Service’s decision was remanded — resulting in the species again being proposed for protection in 2019.

In 2020 we scored a partial win: The Service denied Endangered Species Act protection to Pacific fishers from the central Sierra to the Canadian border but granted them endangered status in the southern Sierra Nevada. So the Center and allies went back to court to defend West Coast fishers left out of that listing. And since the agency dragged its feet on designating critical habitat for the protected population in the southern Sierra, we sued to speed a decision in 2025.

Because Pacific fishers need help on every level, we're also working in California to secure state-level protection. After making Pacific fishers a candidate for protection in response to a 2008 Center petition, in 2010 the state announced it wouldn't place the imperiled mammal on its own endangered species list. So we sued California, and in 2012 a California Superior Court ordered the Fish and Game Commission to reconsider its decision. In response to our petition and lawsuit, in 2015 the California Department of Fish and Wildlife recommended state Endangered Species Act protection for fishers in the southern Sierra Nevada portion of their range.

Meanwhile, a few states away, fishers in the northern Rocky Mountains have been struggling without protection despite facing the same threats as their West Coast cousins — and despite the Center petitioning twice: first in 2009 and then, with allies, in 2013. Finally, after the Center sued to speed protection in March 2016, later that year we won a settlement with the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the next January, the agency announced its consideration of federal protection for northern Rockies fishers. But — following a very familiar pattern — under the first Trump administration, the Service doubled back and denied protection to northern Rockies fishers and 24 other species in dire need.

We won't give up till all fishers' remaining populations get the protections they need to survive.

Check out our press releases to learn more about the Center's actions to save fishers.