PALM BEACH POST (West Palm Beach, Florida) 18 October 05 When good women love rogue tortoises (Michael Browning)
The gopher tortoise in question doesn't have a name or a fax or a cellphone.
He lives in a sandy little burrow he dug with his forelegs and hind legs in a tiny oak grove south of PGA Boulevard, on soon-to-be-developed land near Carmine's Ocean Grill, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Barnes & Noble and a nursing home.
He doesn't know it, but he's about to be evicted.
On Thursday, the Palm Beach Gardens City Council will hold a second reading on the proposed development at Oak Park, 11211 Prosperity Farms Blvd., by John C. Bills Properties Inc.
All the paperwork has been filed, all the requirements have been met. The development will go through, unless the Angel Gabriel blows the Final Trumpet between now and then. The developer is going to relocate the tortoise, at a cost of $1,000, to an approved area no more than 50 miles north or south of where he is now, as state regulations require. There, he might even meet a nice lady tortoise and get hooked up, after years of bachelorhood.
It could be a lot worse. The tortoise could have been buried alive by a bulldozer, to starve slowly to death underground. Other gopher tortoises have been; other gopher tortoises will be. Wal-Mart just killed five of them, at $5,000 a head, after legally obtaining an "Incidental Take Permit" from the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, to build a new big-box store in Lake Park last July.
It could have been eaten. During the Depression, gopher tortoises were a reliable source of free protein for poor Floridians, who called them "Hoover Chickens."
Gopher tortoises are naturally sympathetic creatures. The scientific name for them, Gopherus polyphemus, comes from Homer's Odyssey. They're named after the terrible Cyclops, Polyphemus, the monster who lives in a cave.
They are gentle, not monstrous. They appeal to us thanks to Aesop's old fable of the tortoise and the hare, a story 2,500 years old at least. We applaud the underdog tortoise because, contrary to everything experience teaches us, we like to believe that "slow and steady wins the race."
In fact, slow and steady usually gets killed. At least 68,000 gopher tortoises have been annihilated in Florida in the past 12 years, according to Fish and Wildlife figures. They can't outrun cars or trucks. They live in dry sandy uplands coveted by developers and golfers. They like roomy land, wide territory.
They average, in the wild, 0.6 tortoises per acre. They don't vote, or attend city council meetings. In fast-growing Florida, the hares are clobbering the tortoises.
Up in Tallahassee, they've classified the gopher tortoise as a Species of Special Interest, meaning he is not quite endangered, but people have their eye on him, as a type of wildlife that is getting somewhat rarer.
They have held meetings about him in City Hall in Palm Beach Gardens. Volumes of paperwork have been filed into public record. Multiple phone calls have been made on his behalf.
This particular tortoise is extremely aggravating. He even has a spokesperson, unpaid.
She is Vanne Cohen. Cohen goes back 22 years with him (tortoises live to be 60 years old, sometimes). She stands by her tortoise. She has raised hell with the developer and owner of the 2.29-acre site; with Florida Fish and Wildlife officials; with the city forester, Mark Hendrickson; with everybody who will listen. She describes herself as "a vegetarian and an oddball."
"I just want what's best for the tortoises," Cohen said. "You can only see so much injustice. Just once I'd like to come to work and not see a dead animal on the road. I can't save every single animal in every single development, but this tortoise is something that is living right next to my property. So I'm going to do what I can for him.
"I've lived here 22 years, and I've seen him often. Once, I rescued him from the parking lot. He had wandered out onto the asphalt and was confused, so I took him back into the woods."
Cohen has become a gadfly, a thorn in the side of the developer, along with the Fish and Wildlife Commission and the city of Palm Beach Gardens. After an article on the endangered condition of Florida's reptiles appeared in The Palm Beach Post, she called the paper and began lobbying on behalf of her tortoise. She was very persistent.
This plot of land is very small and is already surrounded by development on all four sides. It is what city planners call "infill." This isn't Disney's Magic Kingdom or Abacoa or Scripps. It is only a couple of acres.
At a certain point, development in Florida becomes its own justification. There is so much of it done already, you might as well finish the job and fill in the blanks. It's like the last slice of pizza. It is only logical to eat it. Otherwise it will just get cold and go to waste.
So, the Oak Park development sums up modern Florida in miniature: This tiny handkerchief of shady oak trees with its single, inconvenient, stubborn, slow-flippered, hardshelled, unbaptized tortoise, living in a gritty little hole, with a next-door neighbor who happens to be a concerned, strident environmentalist; this white maze of paper regulations, these laws that must be obeyed, these fees that must be paid, these procedures — this is what we are coming to.
We are coming to the last crumb of what was here before we were.
The five options
There is a whole protocol about gopher tortoises, one that reaches all the way up to Tallahassee. If you have land with gopher tortoises on it, and you want to develop it, you have to jump through hoops.
"Abacoa was full of them," Palm Beach Gardens forester Hendrickson said, referring to a big "urban village" development at the northern end of the county, where homes go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"In the end, they had to set aside 25 acres for the tortoises. They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They got mitigation benefits for doing it, leaving 'open space,' but at least they did it. They moved all the tortoises they could to the 25 acres."
"There are five options, if gopher tortoises are present on a piece of land," said Kim Jamerson, a spokesperson with the state Fish and Wildlife Commission.
"One. Don't develop at all. This rarely happens," she said.
"Two. Avoid the tortoises' burrows by a 25-foot margin. This doesn't happen much, either.
"Three. Move the tortoises to another spot on the property. For this, you need a permit.
"Four. Relocate the tortoises to other properties. For this, you also need a permit. This is what usually happens.
"Five. Apply for an Incidental Take Permit."
An "Incidental Take Permit" is a euphemism for killing the tortoises, for which the developer pays $5,000 per animal. The money goes to the state, for preservation of alternative habitat for other, living gopher tortoises.
Once the permit has been issued, the bulldozers caterpillar in and either crush the creatures outright or entomb them in their burrows, where they die a slow death of thirst and starvation. Gopher tortoises have very slow metabolisms and can last for months underground until they expire.
"Nobody likes the idea," Jamerson admitted. "We would like to see the tortoises permanently and actively protected. What we are trying to do is group them on land where they can survive and thrive. We don't want to spend all our resources saving individuals. We could save a gopher tortoise here and there, and still see them go extinct.
"All options have their pros and cons. If you leave them on-site, they may get attacked by dogs or crushed by traffic. We're trying to do the best for them that we can."
If you think it is easy to develop 2.29 acres in Palm Beach Gardens, think again. A spokesman for John C. Bills Properties Inc., the firm that wants to develop the parcel and which has already developed the Oak Park office complex adjacent to it, declined to comment on the tortoise, or the project, for this story.
But Hendrickson, city forester for Palm Beach Gardens for the past 16 years, spoke highly of the developer, saying he had shown unusual restraint, even compassion for the bothersome tortoise on his land.
"He's going to relocate him, according to regulations. Actually, this guy is not like your usual developer. He has shown considerable sensitivity for the land and the site. He's going to try to save a lot of the oak trees. He has fulfilled all the requirements. We have got volumes and volumes of paperwork on this little plot of land. We've even had the turtle bleeders come down to sample the tortoise's blood."
Wait a minute. The turtle bleeders?
Astonishing but true: Gopher tortoises are susceptible to a lung disease, caused by an "iridovirus," similar to pneumonia, first discovered in a tortoise on Sanibel Island in 1992. It is characterized by symptoms of "severe, extensive necrotizing ulcerative tracheitis, multifocal necrotizing pneumonia, and multifocal necrotizing ulcerative pharyngitis and esophagitis," according to a paper published by five scientists from the University of Florida that year.
A tortoise that has infected lungs cannot be relocated, lest they spread the virus, which only affects tortoises, not people. So the Fish and Wildlife commission sends down authorized "turtle bleeders" to take a hypodermic full of blood from the tortoise and test it for the disease.
The Oak Park tortoise got nabbed, jabbed, tested, put back in his hole and came up clean. So he can be safely relocated. Hendrickson is hopeful he will live a long, happy life in a new location, though there are always risks when you uproot a tortoise from his burrow and set him down elsewhere.
"With relocation there are no guarantees. But I have been watching this tortoise for nearly 16 years now, and I think he is a rogue male. I believe he has been alone for quite some time," the city forester said. "I think we are giving him a fair chance to reenter the gene pool again. At least I hope so."
"You can't say what will happen to him, not for certain," admitted the state's Jamerson.
"They aren't like a dog. You can't say: 'Sit!' 'Stay!' and expect them to listen. They're wildlife."
When good women love rogue tortoises