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Win-win situation for everyone

Moving the tortoises means they get a new home and the developer can build.

By CHUIN-WEI YAP
Published November 4, 2006

ADVERTISEMENT A gopher tortoise thought to be 30 to 40 years old takes a peek at its new neighborhood at the Cypress Creek Wellfield. [Times photos: Janel Schroeder-Norton] This baby gopher tortoise is among nine turtles that were relocated Friday from the Terra Bella development on State Road 54 to the Cypress Creek Wellfield in Land O'Lakes.

LAND O'LAKES - At 3 months old, the gopher tortoise has a shell that gleams, in patches, the color of the morning sun.

Lee Walton held the baby reptile, only half the size of a grown man's fist, as he walked into the brush to let the critter go.

Nine tortoises, all different ages, had come deep into the Cypress Creek Wellfield on Friday with Walton, an ecologist with Biological Research Associates, and Patty Fesmire, a Tampa Bay Water biologist.

They came so they could live.

"These guys got by by the skin of their teeth," Fesmire said, then laughed at her unwitting irony. "Well, they have no teeth."

If the tortoises had stayed at the 205-acre Terra Bella development on State Road 54 and 20 Mile Level Road, they would have been entombed by bulldozers.

On Friday, they dodged the bullet - thanks to Walton, a Tampa Bay Water rescue mission and a developer willing to afford time and money for the effort. As many as 120 gopher tortoises will be moved from Terra Bella to the central Pasco wellfield.

* * *

Untold numbers of these little vegetarians have died in the crush of development across Pasco.

Until June, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission issued 81,000 "incidental taking" permits, spokesman Willie Puz said.

"Incidental taking" sounds innocuous, but it really means burying the tortoises alive by building over them, even though Puz said not all takings result in entombment.

The tortoises can survive for months even when they are trapped in their burrows, Fesmire said, but this only makes their deaths a slow torture of starvation and immobility.

Gopher tortoises and real estate developers compete for the same dry upland areas. For decades, the tortoise looked destined to lose the contest.

Until late last year, the prevailing wisdom at the state commission was to prevent these tortoises from being relocated.

The critters are susceptible to a kind of respiratory disease, not unlike human influenza. The regulators thought that, once infected, one tortoise could spread the disease to others if moved to different habitats.

So developers found that they could pay the regulators to get a permit for killing the tortoises.

Two factors began to shift the regulatory philosophy.

One was a series of biological studies that convinced regulators that relocation wasn't so bad for tortoises' health after all. The second, at least in Florida, was a case in Lake Park late last year that ignited a national public fury, when Wal-Mart paid $11,409 to entomb five gopher tortoises rather than find a new home for them.

The commission plans to change the rules in June enforcing the gopher tortoise's status as a "threatened species." Until then, incidental taking is still allowed, though biologists say it is now rarer.

* * *

Here's where Tampa Bay Water, Biological Research Associates and Terra Bella's developers, Flagship Development, stepped up to the plate.

The developer could have just killed the gopher tortoises. But it was willing to discuss relocating the animals.

Scrambling to find a suitable place, Walton phoned his friend Fesmire in late August.

Fesmire held the key to 1,200 acres of rich conservation land.

As many as 700 gopher tortoises from other developments might eventually end up on the Tampa Bay Water conservation. If it happens, the move will be gradual and depend on habitat restoration and annual surveys on how the animals are faring, Fesmire said.

"The big winner is the tortoise," Walton said. "They get a nice habitat, and it's managed well."

That's how, at least on Friday, the gopher tortoises won.

Off into the November sun the winners went, like little waddling helmets, nine lucky souls in search - like so many recent arrivals in central Pasco - of a new place to call home.

Chuin-Wei Yap covers growth and development in Pasco County. He can be reached at 813 909-4613 or cyap@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 4, 2006, 08:17:56]