TIMES HERALD-RECORD ; Goats help save rare bog turtles

Goats help save rare bog turtles

TIMES HERALD-RECORD (Middletown, New York) 05 February 06 Goats help save rare bog turtles - Dept. of Agriculture funds project (Wayne A. Hall)
New Paltz: When the winter fades, a small herd of goats will attack weeds and brush on a New Paltz farm, girdling any trees with their horns and grinding smaller plants into mush.
And that will help save the endangered bog turtle, a rare, beautiful, dark-shelled, tiny creature with red or yellow splotches on its neck. The turtle fetches $2,500 on the illegal pet market.
The turtle is on the state's endangered list. Now, a new coalition of private landowners, environmental groups and government has reached across simmering property rights arguments to form a save-the-bog-turtle coalition, using a novel habitat guardian - livestock. Goats, to be exact.
President Bush liked this marriage of interests so much he had the grazer folks down to the White House.
At a time when some powerful property rights advocates are trying to dismantle the federal endangered species act, saying it doesn't compensate landowners for preserving listed species, the New Paltz project provides a solution.
Here's how it works. This 65-acre New Paltz farm (name withheld so collectors don't slip the under-4½-inch turtles into pockets), deploys goats, hired with U.S. Department of Agriculture funds, from a Saugerties vendor who raises goats for meat. He trucks them down to the farm. His 30 or so New Paltz-assigned goats chomp away, opening up the overgrown bog turtle habitat every day on about 15 acres, and fatten themselves for market. Plus, the goats leave fertilizer.
USDA (there's also U.S. Fish and Wildlife money in the project) pays for fencing, too.
"It's a win, win," says goat owner John Addrizzo, a retired Brooklyn pulmonologist who got into the goat business because the meat is low-fat and healthy. He made about $7,000 last year from the first year spring-summer-fall goat assault on the New Paltz farm's invasive plants.
Addrizzo calls his goats from his AMA Farm "'Italian lawn mowers."
Biologist consultant and goat guru Jason Tesauro calls them "living brush hogs."
"They can go where brush hogs can't," adds Addrizzo.
If all that's not enough, there's this: The goats even like poison ivy.
The not-for-profit organic farm, says Allan Bowdery, a farm board member, gains from opened-up pastures for its livestock - a handful of cattle and sheep. And it gains, too, from preserving bog turtles that can add to the farm's nature education program for children.
And Environmental Defense, a national environmental organization, has a big stake in saving bog turtle habitat, as does the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which monitors the project.
Says Environmental Defense ecologist Bruce Hammond, "ED is doing these kinds of projects for different species around the country, helping to break down the animosity that has existed about endangered species."
Determined to make the federal and state bog turtle recovery plans work, Environmental Defense is also running mid-Hudson projects in Dutchess and Columbia counties as well as New Paltz.
"We started in New Jersey and have 50 projects there right now, with more than five years of data," says Tesauro, who works with Environmental Defense as a consultant. He identified goat grazing as a likely New York state and New Jersey answer.
"What we found out," he says, "was the goats had almost wiped out giant reed grass." That's a big invader of turtle habitat.
"And what came back was a mat of native low grass," he adds.
Once the goats are done, sheep and cattle can fine-tune the vegetation.
In a perfect bog turtle world, the sun shines on open meadows laced by rivulets of fresh water. A fen, if you will. Nice grassy spots are basking platforms. Soft mud is an escape hatch and winter hibernation quarters. The turtle likes its wetland water not too hot and not too cold.
But it's "pretty hardy," says Tesauro. "If you preserve a bog turtle habitat, they will come (even if there aren't any there right now)."
Trouble is, this habitat is also prime development land, and more than 90 percent of the endangered, tiny reptile's New York state home range is in private hands - putting its future in doubt. It also lives in scattered colonies on parts of the East Coast.
Small enough to splash around in the puddle made by a cow's hoof, bog turtles still manage to make a big fuss. You read about it all the time. Proposed construction on this mall or that housing development needs a green light from the endangered bog turtle (if it's discovered).
Can the bog turtle's survival make it all the way back to the days of 18th-century Pennsylvania Lutheran minister G.H.E. Muhlenberg, a botanist who stumbled across the turtle, which then became known as Muhlenberg's turtle?
It's a survival race against poaching, overall habitat preservation and hard-to-get funding.
Will invasive plants or the goats and their allies win out in bog turtle country?
Once, bison and elk, and long ago, mastodons, did the habitat trimming. Now, livestock agriculture's on an extinction path itself, in the face of sprawling suburbia.
Still, there's a hopeful date for de-listing the bog turtle from the endangered species list; 2050.
http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2006/02/05/business-whgoats-02-05.html