Groups sue over habitat protection for Sierra Nevada red fox
Edvard Pettersson
(CN) — The Center for Biological Diversity on Monday sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to provide critical habitat protection for the endangered Sierra Nevada red fox.
The nonprofit said in a complaint filed in federal court in Sacramento that the service's 2021 decision — that it wasn't "prudent" to designate critical habitat for the endangered species — unlawfully expanded an exception to the rule requiring critical habitats to be designated when species are declared endangered beyond the limits of the Endangered Species Act.
The service’s determination denied the fox one of the most powerful protections associated with Endangered Species Act listing, according to the environmental advocacy group, as species with designated critical habitats are twice as likely to improve long term compared to those without.
“There’s just no way to save these precious foxes without protecting the places they live,” Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “The human footprint has gotten so huge that not even the high-elevation and snow-covered mountains where these foxes live are safe.”
The Sierra Nevada red fox is among the rarest and most endangered mammals in North America. The species is uniquely adapted to high-elevation, cold and snowy environments, and was historically found throughout the Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascade Ranges in California and Oregon, according to the center.
After decades passed with very few verified sightings of the fox in its namesake Sierra Nevada Range, an individual Sierra Nevada red fox was observed near Sonora Pass on the Stanislaus National Forest in 2010, prompting extensive surveys for the species throughout the high Sierra.
These surveys confirmed the existence of a small, isolated population of 18 to 39 of the foxes in the Sierra Nevada, including the first Sierra Nevada red fox documented south of Yosemite National Park in nearly a century.
It wasn't until 2021 that the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Sierra Nevada Distinct Population Segment of the fox as endangered, but at the same time, the service concluded that the designation of a critical habitat for this population was not prudent.
Under the Endangered Species Act, there are only meant to be rare circumstances where it is “not determinable” or “not prudent” for the service to designate critical habitat at the same time as listing a species as endangered, the center said.
However, an overhaul of the regulations in 2019, under the Trump administration, expanded the use of the "not prudent" exception to include cases where critical habitat designation would be beneficial to the species as long as Fish and Wildlife determines that the destruction, modification or curtailment of a species’ habitat or range is not a threat to the species.
But, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, the foxes are not just severely threatened by climate change and their dangerously small population size. They also face threats to their habitat from snowmobiles and other recreation, development and livestock grazing.
Critical habitat would help address these threats and provide valuable information for land managers seeking to recover the species, the center claims.
“People are harming the natural world in complex and interconnected ways that are devastating to animals like the Sierra Nevada red fox,” Greenwald said. “We’re in an extinction crisis that urgently demands action. We don’t expect to see that action under the Trump administration, but we’ll keep pushing as hard as we can.”
A representative of the Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment on the lawsuit.