Pacific fisher (Martes pennanti)

Get the latest news here on the status of efforts to protect the rare Pacific fisher, now threatened with extinction within the Sierra Nevada. Scroll down the page to read more about the biology of the fisher and links to supporting scientific and policy literature.

March 2, 2010 -- California Denies Protection to the Fisher under California's Endangered Species Act

California's Department of Fish and Game has completed its review of the status of the Pacific fisher, concluding "The Department recommends to the Fish and Game Commission that designation of the fisher in California as threatened/endangered is not warranted."

The Department had determined last March (2009), that the fisher qualified as a candidate species under the California Endangered Species Act, in response to a petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in 2008. We will post the new decision/status review here as soon as the final version becomes available.

February 4, 2010 -- Lawsuit Launched to Defend Pacific Fisher From Federal Negligence

For Immediate Release, February 4, 2010

Contact: Noah Greenwald, (503) 484-7495
Craig Thomas, (530) 622-8718

San Francisco— The Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Forest Legacy, Environmental Protection Information Center, and Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center today filed a formal notice of intent to sue the Department of the Interior over its failure to protect the Pacific fisher — a relative of the mink and otter that has been decimated by historic fur trapping and logging of old-growth forests. Following a petition from the groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged in 2004 that the fisher warranted protection under the Endangered Species Act, but has yet to provide that protection, arguing that it lacks resources. The groups’ notice asserts that continued delay of protection for the fisher is illegal because the Service is failing to make sufficient progress listing species that are waiting for protection.

“The fisher and hundreds of other species have been waiting too long for protection,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The failure to protect the fisher is nothing but foot dragging.”

The fisher is one of 249 species that are designated as candidates for listing as endangered species — a designation that in itself provides no protection. Many have been waiting decades for protection and most are gravely endangered. Although lack of resources is the purported reason for delaying protection for these species, the Obama administration has proposed to cut funding for listing of endangered species by 5 percent. To date, the administration has only protected two species under the Endangered Species Act. By comparison, the Clinton administration protected an average of 65 species per year.

“Secretary Salazar is not prioritizing protection of endangered species,” said Greenwald. “With threats from habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, and climate change all on the rise, budget cuts are the last thing the nation’s endangered species need.”

The fisher once roamed from British Columbia to the southern Sierra. Today, it has been reduced to two native populations — one in the southern Sierra Nevada and one in Northern California and extreme southwestern Oregon and an introduced population in the southern Oregon Cascades. These populations continue to be threatened by logging.

“The Pacific fisher has been devastated by a combination of historic fur trapping and logging of its old-growth forest habitats,” said Craig Thomas, executive director of Sierra Forest Legacy. “Without adequate protection measures on private and federal lands, the fisher will go extinct.”

Background:

Fisher Description and Natural History

The fisher has a long, slender body with short legs. Its head is triangular, with a sharp, pronounced muzzle and large, rounded ears. Fishers are mostly brown, with a long bushy tail. Males range up to 47 inches in length, while females typically only reach 37 inches. Fishers run in a bounding gait, with their front feet leaping forward together, followed by the back feet. Unlike other carnivores, such as cats and dogs, fishers walk on their whole foot.

Contrary to its name, the fisher does not eat fish. The name probably relates to a poor translation of the name for the European polecat, which is a relative of the fisher and is called the fitch ferret, fichet or fitche. Rather than fish, the fisher has a diverse diet, preying on small mammals, snowshoe hare, porcupine, and birds, and also eating carrion, fruit, and truffles. Because it is the only animal that regularly preys on porcupines, which often kill or damage small trees, the timber industry reintroduced the fisher to many parts of the United States, including the southern Cascades of Oregon. The fisher kills porcupines with repeated bites to the face, devouring the porcupine via the quill-less underbelly. Where fisher reintroductions have been successful, porcupines have indeed declined in number.

Read the Notice of Intent here.

January 7, 2010 - Conservationists Defeat Attack on Pacific Fisher

Rare relative of the mink and otter still waiting for protection

San Francisco, CA -- The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals turned down an effort by a timber mill and an anti-wildlife group to preclude the Pacific fisher, a rare relative of the otter and mink, from ever being protected under the Endangered Species Act. In 2004, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the fisher warrants protection as a threatened or endangered species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) but refused to finalize such protection. The defeated lawsuit had hoped to ensure that protection for the fisher would never be finalized.

"The fisher is in need of immediate protection under the Endangered Species Act to survive," said Greg Loarie, attorney with Earthjustice. "We're glad that this effort to stop protection for the fisher was stopped in its tracks."

The Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Forest Legacy and other groups first petitioned to have the fisher protected in 2001. Litigation later brought by Earthjustice eventually resulted in the "warranted but precluded" finding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Sierra Forest Products challenged the finding, saying the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn't have the authority to consider the Pacific fisher a "distinct population segment" eligible for listing under the ESA. In June 2007, Earthjustice intervened in this lawsuit to defend the fisher. A year later the district court rejected Sierra Forest Products' challenge to the listing. Sierra Forest Products subsequently appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and today was tossed out of court.

With the warranted but precluded finding, the fisher is now one of 249 species for which protection has been delayed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. During its eight year tenure, the Bush administration protected a mere 62 species, for a rate of less than eight species per year. This compares to 522 protected under the Clinton administration at a rate of 65 species per year; and 231 species protected under the George H.W. Bush administration at a rate of 58 species per year.

The fisher formerly ranged throughout old-growth forests of Washington, Oregon, northwestern California and the Sierra Nevada. Because of a combination of logging and historic fur-trapping, the fisher is now gone from all of Washington, most of Oregon and half its range in California. It is now found in two disconnected populations -- one in northwestern California and extreme southwestern Oregon, and another in the southern Sierra Nevada.

Earthjustice represented the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Forest Legacy, NRDC, and the Sierra Club.

Contact:
Greg Loarie, Earthjustice, (510) 550-6790
Noah Greenwald, Center for Biological Diversity, (503) 484-7495

Status Update on the fisher re-location in Butte County

March 2010 -- Between November 23, 2009 and January 20, 2010, sixteen Pacific fisher were captured in Siskiyou and Trinity Counties by personnel from the Calif. Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. To date, fifteen fisher have been released in Butte County. One female has died in captivity. The females were surgically implanted with radio transmitters in their abdomens. Males have radio transmitter collars. These emit GPS signals that enable the researchers to track them.

Four females and one male were trapped from a region south of Hwy 96 and Klamath, in Siskiyou County. Eleven more fishers were trapped northwest of Buckhorn Summit, and in two areas north and south of Hwy 3 between Hayfork and Weaverville in Trinity County, netting six females and five males.

Fifteen of the captured Pacific fishers have now been released onto Sierra Pacific Industries forest lands located between Hwy 32 and The Skyway Road, and Hwy 70.

The released fisher have begun to move onto publicly owned, protected forests in the Plumas National Forest.

The U.S. F&WS and CDF&G are currently working on development of a website that will allow the public access to real time information about the status of the fisher translocations. Read more about the project in the document files listed at the end of this page.

July 21, 2009 - California Department of Fish and Game issued a Notice of Determination to go forward with the plan to capture 40 fishers over a three year period, place radio transmitter collars in them on them, and release them on SPI forest lands in the Stirling Tract region of Butte County.

January 9, 2009 - The California Department of Fish and Game has released a Notice of Intent (Jan. 9) to approve a controversial plan to permit the capture and release of 40 Pacific fisher on lands owned by Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) in the Northern Sierra Nevada. The plan provides the company with assurances of no new restrictions on logging activities within the 250 square mile region where the release will occur (the "Stirling Tract") -- even if the Pacific fisher is listed under the Endangered Species Act in the future.

Read SFL's comments here.

Visit the Action Alert page for more information and additional reading materials.

Life History

The rarely encountered Pacific fisher is in the family Mustelidae, the largest member of the genus Martes. The only other North American member of the genus Martes is the American marten (M. americana). The fisher is light brown to dark blackish brown with the face, neck, and shoulders sometimes being slightly gray. The chest and underside often has irregular white patches. The fisher has a long body with short legs and a long bushy tail. At 6.6 to 13.2 pounds, male fishers weigh about twice as much as females (3.3 to 5.5 lbs). Males range in length from 35 to 47 inches while females range from 29 to 37 in long. Fishers are estimated to live up to 10 years.

The diet of the fisher includes birds, snowshoe hares, squirrels, mice, shrews, voles, porcupines, reptiles, insects, carrion, vegetation, and fruit. Fishers hunt exclusively in forested habitats and generally avoid openings. Being dietary generalists, fishers tend to forage in areas where prey is both abundant and vulnerable to capture. Selection of foraging habitat may be driven by habitat relationships of primary prey species.

Except during the breeding season, fishers are solitary animals. The breeding season for the fisher is generally from late February to the end of April. Raised entirely by the female, kits are completely dependent at birth and weaned by 10 weeks. The mother becomes increasingly active as kits grow in order to provide enough food, and females may move their kits periodically to new dens. At 1 year, kits will have developed their own home ranges. Fishers have a low annual reproductive capacity, and reproductive rates may fluctuate widely from year to year.

Habitat

The fisher, a relative of the mink, otter, and marten, is a predator dependent upon mature and old growth forests for habitat. Fishers use large areas of primarily coniferous forests with fairly dense canopies and large trees, snags, and down logs. The fisher prefers mature and old-growth forests with high canopy cover, and requires large trees for denning. The fisher dens in rotting logs, hollow trees, and rocky crevices of old growth forests. They are specialized animals that frequently travel along waterways and rest in or on live trees, snags, or logs with cavities. These characteristics are usually only found in large, undisturbed tracts of old forest. Douglas fir is the most common species used for resting in northern California, whereas oak, white fir, and red fir are commonly used in the southern Sierra. The diameter of trees used by fisher for resting and denning is consistently large. Rest sites are widely distributed throughout fisher habitat.

Each individual travels over a home range of 50-150 square miles, even more in winter when food is scarce. A home range is an area repeatedly traveled by an individual in its normal activities (i.e. feeding, drinking, and resting). Fishers have large home ranges and male home ranges are considerably larger than those of females. Fisher home range sizes across North America vary from 3,954 to 30,147 acres (16 to 122 square kilometers for males and from 988 to 13,096 ac (4 to 53 square km for females).

Rest sites are natural structures that provide protection from unfavorable weather and predators. Re-use of rest sites are relatively low (14 percent: Zielinski et al. 2004), indicating that habitats providing suitable resting structures need to be widely distributed throughout home ranges of fishers and spatially interconnected with foraging habitats.

Rest site structures used by fishers include: cavities in live trees, snags, hollow logs, fallen trees, canopies of live trees, platforms formed by mistletoe (‘‘witches brooms’’) or large or deformed branches, and to a lesser extent stick nests, rocks, ground cavities, and slash and brush piles. Tree size, age, and structural features are important characteristics of a rest structure. Zielinski et al. (2004) stated that rest structures in their study areas in the North Coast and the southern Sierra Nevada were among the largest diameter trees available. Trees must be large and old enough to bear the type of stresses that initiate cavities, and the type of ecological processes (e.g., decay, woodpecker activity) that form cavities of sufficient size to be useful to fishers; tree species that typically decay to form cavities in the bole are more important than those that do not.

The most influential variables affecting rest site selection in California fisher populations include maximum tree sizes and dense canopy closure, but other features are important to rest site choice as well, such as large diameter hardwoods, large conifer snags, and steep slopes near water. Fishers select areas as rest sites where structural features are most variable but where canopy cover is least variable, suggesting that resting fishers place a premium on continuous overhead cover but prefer resting locations that also have a diversity of sizes and types of structural elements (Zielinski et al. 2004).

Threats

The west coast population of the Pacific fisher is endangered due to habitat loss and fragmentation, small population sizes and isolation, and human-caused mortality from incidental trapping and vehicle collisions. Timber harvest can fragment fisher habitat, reduce it in size, or change the forest structure to be unsuitable for fishers. Fisher are also reluctant to cross open areas to recolonize historical habitat. Logging and development have caused severe loss and fragmentation of old-growth forests--as little as 5 percent of this forest type remains in the Sierra Nevada. Stand replacing wildfires, as well as management activities designed to prevent such fires by reducing the amount and continuity of forest fuels, all can result in significant reduction in suitable habitat needed to provide for fisher viability. The complex and probabilistic interplay between such habitat threats, as well as incomplete information on fisher biology, creates great uncertainty about the current health of the southern Sierra fisher population and how it is likely to change in the future. Global climate change is also predicted to have severe impacts in the Sierra Nevada, with greatly reduced snow pack in the winter and increased drought and wildfires in the region, thereby underscoring the need to protect the remaining habitat for this species and others that also require old forest attributes.

Conservation

The Bush Administration’s 2004 Sierra Nevada Framework revisions have increased logging in old growth forests throughout the Sierra Nevada and particularly in key fisher habitat. The revisions to the 2001 Framework plan dismantle the Southern Fisher Conservation Area, which until the revisions were adopted, helped protect forests throughout existing fisher habitat. The revisions also increased off-highway vehicle use and road construction within the fisher’s home ranges. Severe loss and fragmentation of habitat caused by logging has lead to the near extinction of the fisher from its west coast range. The species has less dispersal power compared to another imperiled species, the California spotted owl, and they are comparatively slow to recolonize their historic range. Because the fisher cannot fly over logged areas, it is considerably more sensitive to fragmentation of old forests than the owl. In the Sierra Nevada, fishers currently occupy less than half their historic range, with a gap of 350 miles separating the northern and southern California populations (Zielinski et al. 2005). Having apparently been extirpated from the central and northern Sierra, a small population does persist in the southern Sierras, south from Yosemite National Park to the vicinity of the Greenhorn Mountains in southern Tulare County. The initial Giant Sequoia National Monument plan advanced by the Bush Administration sought to dramatically increase logging within the core habitat of remaining fisher populations in the southern Sierra Nevada. The Pacific fisher depends upon forest management decisions which ensure the protection of large, continuous blocks of mature and old growth forests.

Restoring and managing preferred forest habitats throughout the Sierra is essential to conserve the fisher. Maintaining connectivity of habitats is important to enable the fisher to recolonize the central and northern Sierra from the fisher populations in the south. Conservation of the fisher also necessitates protecting and restoring the black oak woodlands component of mixed-conifer forest ecosystems, conserving large deformed trees, and reestablishing patches of lush layered ground vegetation, snags, and fallen logs to provide conditions for abundant prey.

Status

Currently, only three small, isolated populations of the Pacific fisher remain, including native populations in northwestern California and the southern Sierra Nevada and a reintroduced population in the southern Oregon Cascades. An analysis by Forest Service researchers indicates that, in the absence of stronger protection measures, the fisher is likely to become extinct in the southern Sierra within 50 years.

In 2004, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that the west coast distinct population segment of the fisher "may be at significant risk of extinction" and that protection under the Endangered Species Act is "warranted,” but that listing the species was precluded by higher priorities. For the first time in the history of the Endangered Species Act, a presidential administration, the Bush Administration, has not listed a single species as threatened or endangered without being forced to do so through petitions and/or litigation. And without a doubt, this administration also holds the worst record for the number of imperiled species it has listed while in office. A "warranted but precluded" determination (like the one the FWS made for the fisher) is only allowed if the FWS is making "expeditious progress" towards listing other species. Clearly that requirement for the warranted but precluded status is not remotely close to being fulfilled.

Read SFL's and our conservation partners' response here.