Tortoises airlifted to new home to make room for Fort Irwin expansion

PRESS-ENTERPRISE (Riverside, California) 05 April 08 Tortoises airlifted to new home to make room for Fort Irwin expansion (Jennifer Bowles)
The helicopter sweeping above the desert scrub Friday northeast of Barstow carried rare and precious cargo in the aluminum boxes mounted above both skids.
The specially built boxes held 11 desert tortoises, each contained in a plastic sweater box secured with duct tape and punched with holes so the creatures could breathe. The reptiles, threatened with extinction, were among hundreds being relocated from land where the Army wants to train soldiers with tanks and weaponry of war.
"It's better they take a nine-minute helicopter ride than a bumpy two-hour truck trip" on dirt roads, said Bill Boarman, a scientist contracted by the Army to oversee the relocation.
The tortoises -- protected by one of the nation's most powerful environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act -- moved Friday were airlifted to an area west of the Calico Mountains and five miles north of Interstate 15. The Army's two-week operation will relocate nearly 770 of the reptiles from the southern border of the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, where troops from across the country battle a home team posing as the enemy.
The $8.5 million move, the culmination of a 20-year battle that pitted environmentalists against the military, went ahead despite two environmental groups' recent threat to sue.
"We are at war, and we need to train the solider so they are prepared," said Muhammad Bari, environmental divisions chief at Fort Irwin.
The Army is expanding its training grounds by 131,000 acres to accommodate faster-moving tanks and longer-range weaponry. Some of that land, which had been under U.S. Bureau of Land Management jurisdiction, is considered critical for the tortoises to survive.
The Army had its eye on a far bigger chunk of land in the past. In 1997, the Army wanted 331,217 acres, and earlier proposals were even larger, said Elden Hughes, a longtime Sierra Club member who lives in Joshua Tree.
Hughes, 76, said both sides compromised over the years. But still, he fears some of the tortoises will die after the move.
"Your soul cries. And the desert will be the poorer for it," he said. "Do it the best you can, but you realize you're losing things."
Hughes said the large burrows that the lumbering reptiles dig create homes for a slew of wildlife, including burrowing owls, coyotes and lizards.
"It creates most of the terrestrial homes in the desert; all life suffers if we lose the tortoise."
In the largest field experiment of its type, government and private scientists will study how the tortoises adapt to their new habitat over the next four years.
Scientists will check on their health, whether respiratory and shell diseases show up in larger numbers, whether they stay within their new habitat, and whether their reproduction is affected by the move, said Kristin Berry, a wildlife biologist and tortoise expert with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Fort Irwin's Bari said that, if the tortoises fare poorly in their new habitat, the Army will consult the scientists to see if anything should be done.
Work on the relocation project started 18 months ago when biologists began tracking tortoises in the area Fort Irwin had claimed.
The scientists attached transmitters to the tortoises' shells, assessed the animals' health and conducted blood tests. Reptiles that tested positive for a contagious respiratory disease were left in their habitat and will be tested again later, Berry said. They could be put in pens at Fort Irwin away from healthy tortoises and the tanks, but if they are in bad shape, they may be euthanized and necropsied, she said.
On Friday, a crew of 25 from an Army contractor moved 37 tortoises. Crew members armed with radios had scoured the land in the Fort Irwin expansion area Thursday to locate the tortoises, then gave them water, examined them and loaded them into boxes to await Friday's flights.
At the new location, each tortoise was placed in a burrow, some manmade, or under the shade of a creosote bush.
Colin Spake, one of the biologists, donned gloves to take female tortoise No. 2552 from her box and hoist her with string to weigh her -- just over 5 pounds -- with a spring scale. After recording the location and other details, he placed her into the burrow. Later, she could be seen peering out.
The Center for Biological Diversity and Desert Survivors have filed an official notice of intent to sue, alleging the relocation area is plagued by illegal dumping and off-roading, mines, lower-quality habitat, and tortoises with diseases that could spread to the new arrivals.
The decline of the reptiles, which have lived in the Mojave Desert for hundreds of thousands of years, has been blamed on disease, predation by ravens, habitat loss and off-roading, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They are found in widely scattered areas of the Mojave in California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.
Ileene Anderson, a biologist with the center, said the groups still plan to file suit.
"We want the relocation area to be much better protected then it currently is," she said.
"It's an onerous, gigantic experiment to begin with," Anderson said, noting that research has found that 20 percent of relocated tortoises die or can never be found again. "So that's a big hit. Compounding that with disease problems just seems like it dilutes the effectiveness of the translocation."
On Friday, biologists said time will tell.
Berry glanced at the ground, noticing desert dandelions and other annual flowers the tortoise eat.
"There were tortoises here already," she said. "One of the questions we'll find out is how many will stay and who will leave."
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_D_tortoises05.3a23a1f.html

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Mojave tortoises moved for Army training

FORT IRWIN, Calif. (AP) -- Scientists have begun moving the Mojave Desert's flagship species, the desert tortoise, to make room for tank training at the Army's Fort Irwin despite protests by some conservationists.

The controversial project, billed as the largest desert tortoise move in California history, involves transferring 770 endangered reptiles from Army land to a dozen public plots overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Fort Irwin has sought to expand its 643,000-acre training site into tortoise territory for two decades. The Army said it needs an extra 131,000 acres to accommodate faster tanks and longer-range weapons used each month to train some 4,000 troops.

Desert tortoises are the longest-living reptiles in the Southwest with a potential life span of 100 years and can weigh up to 15 pounds. Their population has been threatened in recent years by urbanization, disease and predators including the raven.

Weeks before the relocation, two conservation groups threatened to sue Fort Irwin. The Center for Biological Diversity and Desert Survivors contend that the land set aside for the desert tortoises is too close to an interstate highway and is plagued with off-road vehicles and illegal dumping that would disturb the animals.

The groups served Fort Irwin with a 60-day notice of intent to sue and plan to file the lawsuit after the desert tortoises have been moved.

"There's still a lot of work that needs to be done to make the relocation site more habitable ... so the animals would survive better there," said Ileene Anderson, a staff biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Fort Irwin lawyers and federal wildlife officials determined the claims were unfounded and decided to go ahead with the $8.5 million project. The process began last weekend and will last two weeks. The tortoises, including about 67 babies, are being moved into habitats approved by the U.S. Geological Survey and other experts.

"The translocation of tortoises is a very complex process," Fort Irwin spokesman John Wagstaffe said in a recent interview. "You have to move them gently and make sure they don't get stressed during the move."

About a year before the transfer, biologists tagged desert tortoises living in the proposed training expansion area with radio transmitters and took blood tests to make sure they were healthy.

Scientists have a short window to relocate the animals, which recently awakened from winter hibernation and will return to their burrows in the summer.

Last weekend, a group equipped with receivers scanned the desert for signs of the tagged tortoises, placed them in plastic containers and hauled them to their new home. They were given water and released.

Scientists will continue to monitor the relocated tortoises for signs of stress.

Research studies show relocated tortoises typically spend the first year roaming. Over time, they settle down and survive as well as tortoises that stayed put, said Roy Averill-Murray, desert tortoise recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Reno, Nev.

"We're plopping them down in a new area that they're not familiar with so they spend the first year or so learning their surroundings and where the good burrow sites are," Averill-Murray said Thursday.

Averill-Murray helped plan the Fort Irwin project, but is not involved in the actual move.

http://www.irwin.army.mil/

SAN BERNARDINO SUN (California) 04 April 08 Tortoise Transfer: 800 being moved out of forts way (Lauren McSherry)
Newberry Springs: The helicopter carrying unusual cargo circled once before setting down Friday on a rocky patch of desert just east of the Calico Mountains and south of Coyote Lake.
It was loaded with desert tortoises - 11 of them - that had been tenderly placed in individual, clear Sterilite boxes secured in aircraft-grade aluminum bins attached to each side of the helicopter.
The landing complete, researchers ran to the helicopter to retrieve the reptiles.
The drop-off was the fourth of the day at one of 13 sites being used for the relocation of nearly 800 desert tortoises in the Mojave Desert.
The effort to remove the tortoises from harm's way was initiated by the National Training Center and Fort Irwin, which is expanding its borders in order to train soldiers being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
But by pushing its borders west and south, Fort Irwin is encroaching on areas occupied by the desert tortoise, which is federally listed as a threatened species.
The Army has spent more than $8.5 million on research and relocation of the tortoises, said Muhammad Bari, environmental division chief at Fort Irwin.
The effort began March 27, and is expected to take about two more weeks, said Kristin Berry, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist based in Riverside. It is being carried out by several federal and state agencies and ITS Corp.
The helicopter is crucial to the effort because it makes for easy access to the remote and largely undeveloped 389-square-mile area south of Fort Irwin. It also spares the tortoises from a long, bumpy ride over dirt roads to the distant sites.
Before being flown in, the tortoises are weighed, measured and given a water bath to help re-hydrate them. They then are tested for upper respiratory tract disease, a deadly illness that has broken out in areas of the High Desert.
The relocation is not the largest ever attempted - more than 1,000 tortoises have been moved in other parts of the Southwest - but the scope of the project is groundbreaking.
No relocation has involved moving an entire intact population from one area to another, nor has there ever been such extensive long-term monitoring of tortoises and their habitat, said William Boarman, a project leader with Conservation Science Research & Consulting.
Berry is one of the experts involved in the monitoring. She hopes it will answer a number of questions, particularly about the respiratory disease and its causes.
She also wonders how the relocated tortoises will fare.
"How many are going to stay?" she asked. "Will any head for home? Do they have a homing capability?"
X-rays will be taken of female tortoises to see how moving them has affected reproduction, and DNA will be collected from hatchlings to see if there is any interbreeding between the original tortoise population and the newly added population, Berry said.
Transmitters resembling miniature car antennas are attached to the sides of the tortoises' shells so scientists can map their movements and retrieve them to study their health over the next five years.
The relocation has garnered some controversy. Last month, the Center for Biological Diversity and Desert Survivors announced plans to file a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army over the relocation project. The groups want the military to do a better job of protecting the animals by prohibiting off-road vehicles, stepping up enforcement against illegal dumping and limiting roads in the area.
On Friday, as the sun reached its zenith, one tortoise, released beneath the shade of a creosote bush, emerged to chomp on some tufts of green filaree.
Earlier in the day, Berry had stood surveying the desert and this year's extraordinary wildflower bloom, which guarantees plenty of food for the tortoises.
"This is a very good year for a release," she said.
http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_8818216