LAKEPORT — While the chi push up Adobe Creek and Kelsey Creek for what may be one of their last legally unprotected spawns, a federal lawsuit filed last month is trying to force Washington to do what it was supposed to have done in January.

The Center for Biological Diversity sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on April 21 in the Northern District of California, asking the court to order the agency to finalize Endangered Species Act protection for the Clear Lake hitch — the silver native minnow Pomo people call chi. The case, Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was assigned to Magistrate Judge Robert M. Illman in the court’s Eureka division and carries docket number 1:26-cv-03333.

The agency’s missed deadline is the heart of the case. In the final days of the Biden administration, on January 16, 2025, the Service published a proposed rule listing the hitch as threatened, with a Section 4(d) rule carving out exceptions for habitat work, fish rescue, cultural collection and cannabis cleanup. Federal law gave FWS one year from that proposal to publish a final rule. January 2026 came and went. The rule did not.

“It’s appalling that the Trump administration continues to ignore the law while these iconic fish edge closer to extinction,” Meg Townsend, a freshwater attorney at the Center, said in a statement announcing the suit. “Clear Lake hitch, the beloved ‘chi,’ are being stranded not just in drying streams, but in bureaucratic limbo. Without immediate protections we risk losing them forever.”

The Center first petitioned California and federal regulators to list the hitch back in 2012. The state moved in 2014, designating chi as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act. Federal action stalled for the next decade. In December 2020, near the end of the first Trump administration, FWS denied protection. The Center sued, won a remand, and that fight produced the January 2025 proposal that the agency then failed to finalize.

The federal Service has not commented publicly on the new lawsuit. A request for comment from the Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office was not returned by Tuesday afternoon.

A peg that holds: zero listings in 2025

The hitch case is one of several deadline lawsuits the Center has filed in recent weeks against FWS, including suits over the coal darter on April 7 and the salamander mussel on April 23. The Center notes — and the Federal Register confirms — that 2025 was the first calendar year since 1981 in which the Endangered Species Act produced no new listings. The current administration has yet to add a single plant or animal in its second term.

That’s a strong tell about what’s driving the litigation. The Center’s filing is a deadline suit, not a fight over the science. The relief asked for is narrow: a court order directing the Service to issue the final rule by a date certain.

The local stakes are immediate

The lawsuit landed in the middle of the 2026 spawning run. The Lake County Water Resources Department announced on February 27 that hitch had begun their migration up Clear Lake’s tributaries; Sacramento suckers had been seen in the creeks since February 19. By the standards of recent years, this run is already further along than most observers feared.

County water staff and tribal partners — the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake, the Robinson Rancheria of Pomo Indians and the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians — pulled 3,347 stranded hitch from drying creeks during the 2025 season alone. The bulk of those rescues came out of Adobe Creek between late March and mid-April, with more than 2,000 fish lifted from a single week’s stranding events at the Big Valley Road crossing alone. The diversion at Elk Mountain Road on Clover Creek was another regular chokepoint.

The cause is not subtle. The chi need water flowing in their natal creeks for roughly two weeks each spring — long enough for adults to spawn and for eggs to hatch and the young fish to wash back down to the lake. Adobe, Kelsey, Manning, Thompson, Forbes, Clover and Robinson creeks are the spawning corridors that matter, and they are also the same creeks tapped for vineyard irrigation, cannabis cultivation and county-domestic use. When ag draws collide with the spawn, the hitch lose.

That collision is the subject of an ongoing hydrologic study by O’Connor Consulting that came before the Lake County Board of Supervisors on April 7. The work is meant to model how surface and groundwater pumping in Big Valley shapes instream flows during the spawn — the kind of evidence that any future federal recovery plan would lean on. The state is moving on a parallel track: the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is set to release its instream-flow evaluation for hitch passage in Clear Lake tributaries in a public meeting May 15.

The political weather

In January, the second Trump administration inherited a hitch listing that was three weeks short of needing a signature. It chose to let the deadline lapse. Section 4(b)(6)(A) of the ESA gives the public a citizen-suit remedy for that kind of inaction, and Townsend — who has been working the hitch file at the Center since 2014 — used it.

Whether a federal listing alone will keep enough water in Adobe Creek next spring is a different question. The hitch already enjoy state-listed status, and the chi rescue trucks still ran every weekend last March. But a federal listing brings the heavier enforcement tools — Section 9 take prohibitions, Section 7 consultation requirements on any federal nexus, and access to recovery-plan funding — that the state listing alone has not been able to summon.

For now, the chi are running. The court will set a briefing schedule in the coming weeks.

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Roger Coryell is the editor of Wine Country Daily. Reach him at roger@rogercoryell.com or (707) 892-3953.

Sources

• Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, N.D. Cal. 1:26-cv-03333, filed April 21, 2026 (CourtListener docket 73219170).
• Center for Biological Diversity press release, “Lawsuit Seeks Endangered Species Protection for California’s Clear Lake Hitch,” April 21, 2026.
• Center for Biological Diversity press release, “Lawsuit Launched to Secure Protection for Clear Lake Hitch,” February 3, 2026.
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Service Proposes to List Clear Lake Hitch,” January 16, 2025; Federal Register, FR Document 2024-31756, pp. 4916–4941.
• Lake County Water Resources Department, Clear Lake Hitch Program 2025 rescue tally and Feb 27, 2026 spawning notice.
• Lake County Record-Bee, “Study of Big Valley streams, creeks aim to improve Hitch spawning habitat,” April 10, 2026.
• California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Clear Lake Watershed Study; public meeting notice for May 15, 2026.
• Press Democrat, “Environmental group sues Trump administration seeking stronger protections for imperiled Clear Lake fish,” April 21, 2026.
• Lake County News, item #84256, April 21, 2026.