BONITA DAILY NEWS (Florida) 15 February 07 Could this be the future of gopher tortoise protection in Southwest Florida? (Jeremy Cox)
Maureen Bonness slogged through knee-high wire grass Wednesday afternoon with one eye on the lookout for poison ivy and the other searching for gopher tortoise burrows.
The latter weren’t hard to find. A team of surveyors, along with Bonness, had walked almost every inch of the 40-acre preserve a week and a half earlier, marking burrows with bright orange tape.
In all, the Willow Run Quarry Preserve is streaked with 95 bits of tape. A survey done in September 2005 found 71 burrows.
“That’s good news,” Bonness, the preserve’s manager, said of the uptick in burrows. “They’re staying here.”
Since 1991, the state agency responsible for protecting the creature, which is listed as a species of special concern, has allowed developers to kill more than 74,000 tortoises. But the days of entombing tortoises in their burrows appear to be numbered.
Relocation, of which Bonness is a dedicated proponent, is in.
Last month, a state-sponsored group of 19 wildlife advocates, government officials and business leaders recommended that the state stop issuing “incidental take” permits. Exceptions would be granted only if a relocation site couldn’t be found, according to the proposal.
The move could take a step closer to reality Friday with the release of a revised state conservation plan for gopher tortoises. The plan is an outgrowth of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s decision last year to “uplist” the tortoise’s status to threatened.
An official with Fish and Wildlife said Wednesday that the plan was undergoing constant revision, even as its public release drew to within 48 hours. But one thing is certain: The plan will seek to reduce developers’ dependency on gopher tortoise incidental take permits, say those involved in shaping the plan.
Barbara Burgeson, Collier County’s principal environmental specialist and a member of the state’s tortoise stakeholder group, said one of the options being considered is lowering permits by 90 percent over the next 10 years.
The plan is set to go before the governor-appointed Conservation Commission in June.
Under state law, the battle between developer and gopher tortoise can end several ways: leaving the tortoises alone, creating a preserve on the property, relocating the tortoises elsewhere, or paving over the burrows with the animal still inside and paying mitigation fees to, in theory, compensate for the loss.
The fees are used to buy open land for gopher tortoises, but critics say that the fees are too low to replace the land that was lost acre for acre.
Ray Ashton, president of the Ashton Biodiversity Research and Preservation Institute near Gainesville, said he hopes the new plan requires every acre lost to be replaced. But, he added: “I’ll fall on the floor in shock if they put this in the plan.”
Ashton filed a formal request two years ago with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have the agency consider listing the gopher tortoise as threatened. The species is not currently protected under federal law.
For years, relocation has been considered the least effective mitigation option because the tortoises simply vanished after they were moved. Scientists also worried that relocating tortoises would spread a mysterious upper-respiratory disease to previously healthy groups. But recent research suggests the disease is not as serious as once thought.
Ashton, with Bonness’ help, is out to prove that relocation is key to the gopher tortoises’ survival.
A few years ago, Bonness attended a workshop that Ashton had dubbed a “gopher tortoise boot camp” on Sanibel Island. Bonness, a botanist by trade, had become the steward of about a half-dozen tortoises when her family’s business was required to set aside land for preservation in East Naples.
Her brother, Joe, is the chief executive officer of Better Roads, one of Collier’s top road-building firms. And her family, along with another investor, owns Willow Run Quarry, east of Collier Boulevard about two miles south of Interstate 75.
In the mid-1990s, when the quarry was being expanded, federal regulators required 225 acres to be preserved to shield wetlands from development and to provide habitat for the Florida panther.
During the “boot camp” workshop, it “dawned on” to Bonness that her humble preserve could become a gopher tortoise recipient site. She soon began working with Ashton and state officials to turn the idea into reality. Of the 225 acres, roughly 40 were deemed dry enough to support tortoises.
In February 2004, the preserve took in 50 gopher tortoises from a site being turned into a subdivision north of Immokalee Road in North Naples. Last September, two more joined the growing tortoise city. Four more could be on their way.
With a machete on her hip — for hacking out exotic melaleuca trees — Bonness bent over one of her many burrows Wednesday.
“You see these little holes right here,” she said, pointing to three dark circles in the sand, “that’s the front claw. She’s probably out feeding.”
The burrow had been dug into the side of a small, circular berm. The preserve is dotted with 11 such humps, which are intended to provide dry ground for tortoises when other burrows get flooded, Bonness said.
Ashton and Bonness believe they have largely solved the problem of tortoises fleeing their new surroundings. Tortoises try to return to their previous home. So, to counteract that instinct, Bonness and Ashton use hay bales or vinyl wrap to box them in for up to six months.
Protecting the gopher tortoise doesn’t just benefit one species, Ashton said. About 360 types of critters, from snakes to mice, use their burrows as refuges.
“It’s not just a keystone species because so many species revolved around the gopher tortoise burrow,” Ashton said. “It also is a symbol of the status of the habitat it lives in. If we do a good job of sustaining the gopher tortoise, we know we’re doing a damn good job of sustaining the habitat for all those species.”
Could this be the future of gopher tortoise protection in Southwest Florida?