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On the Ground: Rare Tortoise Stars in Western Drama
A showdown in the West recently pitted two unlikely opponents against each other: a South Korean car company and the slow-moving, imperiled desert tortoise.
The confrontation never came to fisticuffs or gun slinging, but life and death was certainly on the line—at least for the tortoise. The showdown was sparked by a proposal by the Hyundai Motor Company to build auto test tracks, including one more than twice as long as the Indianapolis 500 course, in the middle of the desert near Mojave, California. The area is prime habitat for the tortoises, which move too slowly to get out of the way of cars or bulldozers.
In fact, the ambling reptiles have been unable to outrun the machinations of humans in general. An increase in housing and industrial development in the desert has led to the destruction of habitat as well as an increase in ravens and other tortoise predators. Off-road vehicle use also has exploded. As a result of these pressures, tortoise numbers in the Mojave Desert have declined by 90 percent since the 1980s, and populations of the species north and west of the Colorado River are listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
Despite the threats, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees management of endangered species, had approved the destruction of 4,300 acres of habitat and the killing of as many as 54 tortoises during the building and use of Hyundai’s tracks. The service’s plan also allowed hibernating tortoises to be extracted from their dens and boxed into on-site artificial burrows while they awaited shipment to other areas.
Handling and moving tortoises greatly increases their chances of contracting diseases and dying. Conservationists were thus concerned that far more than 54 of the imperiled tortoises would eventually die. So Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity rode to the rescue of the tortoises in 2004 with a lawsuit seeking to halt the Hyundai project.
Rather than getting stuck in a legal shoot-out, though, both sides decided to settle the case out of court last year. In the settlement, Hyundai agreed to purchase more than 3,000 acres of wildlife habitat, improved their program of relocating tortoises and agreed to create an additional easement to protect an endangered plant. The habitat acquisition included the purchase of “Camp C,” a critical desert tortoise conservation area.
“The acquisition of Camp C significantly improved the chances for desert tortoises to survive in the Desert Tortoise Natural Area,” says Cynthia Wilkerson, Defenders’ California representative.
But additional threats to tortoises remain elsewhere in California. Early this year, the California Department of Fish and Game approved the installation of several artificial water sources—known as “guzzlers”—in the Mojave National Preserve. The guzzlers supply water to mule deer—a popular target for hunters. Unfortunately, the guzzlers also attract ravens, which eat young tortoises. The water poses a direct hazard for tortoises as well—biologists have found drowned tortoises in nearly 25 percent of guzzlers in other areas. Defenders has requested that the state fish and game department develop a guzzler policy, in which it examines and addresses the harmful impacts to desert tortoises from these artificial water sources.
In the meantime, Defenders and other conservation groups will continue working to keep these endangered reptiles from going the way of the Pony Express.
