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TORTOISES AND MORE -- Jim Matthews Outdoor Column 2jul03
$100 million on tortoises and what do you get?
The federal government has spent over $100 million on desert tortoises over the past 10 years and the critters are probably closer to extinction than they were before so much money was lavished on studying and managing these ancient creatures.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that has been done to help the tortoises was to close roads in the desert, harass cattle ranchers into pulling cattle off the ground to protect tortoises at certain times of year, and build miles of short fences to keep tortoises from getting on roads. The obvious question is why tortoise numbers haven't gotten better if these fixes were supposed to help? In fact, the numbers are worse.
Since there's little evidence that many tortoises are run over on dirt roads or that cattle are a problem, maybe it's the new fences that are hurting things. I've heard from desert regulars that ravens now fly these fences all spring, when the baby tortoises are first venturing out from the nest. The babies come to a fence and then follow it. It acts like a net, concentrating them. The ravens, bright birds, fly the fenceline and feast on the young. A booming raven population has already been identified as one of the major sources of tortoise decline, and the experts are concentrating the babies for these birds. You have to wonder if the people who come up with this kind of stuff could get a real job.
Has the $100 million been used to reduce the raven overpopulation, develop drugs for the respiratory problems tortoises contract, start a disease-free desert tortoise captive breeding population, or anything else that would actually help recover the species? Do we have tortoise population estimates that are viable? Do we have historical perspective on how today's population compares to 25, 50, 100 or 200 years ago so we know how bad or normal this current decline might be? Is it even a decline?
I may not have a doctorate in desert ecology, but I could guarantee you that if you gave me $10 million a year for the next 10 years, there'd be tortoises -- of a wide genetic diversity, disease free, with strong year classes of young -- all over our desert. This whole process is more about restricting people than recovering a species or we'd be spending the money differently.