"LOS ANGELES - The Trump administration on Thursday denied Endangered Species Act protection to a weasel-like woodland mammal called the Pacific fisher across most of its West Coast range, except for a dwindling population in California’s southern Sierras.

The final decision from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sharply criticized by conservation groups, marked a reversal of the agency’s 2019 proposal to list the Pacific fisher as a threatened species from northern California to the Canadian border.

It capped a 20-year legal battle by environmental groups seeking to protect the elusive, tree-dwelling predator whose diet includes porcupines, squirrels and other small mammals in the old-growth forests razed by logging in the Pacific Northwest."

Steve Gorman reports for Reuters May 14, 2020. [2]