Desert tortoise ‘preservation’ a waste of money
Sixty desert tortoises, each equipped with a radio transmitter, were released last week at the southern end of the Nevada National Security Site, 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Researchers plan to track the creatures as part of ongoing studies aimed at increasing their numbers in the wild.
The phrase “in the wild” is vital in reconciling the tortoise’s designation as a threatened species with its abundance in Clark County.
More than two decades after that designation, researchers admit they still have no baseline for how many tortoises should exist. So how will they be able to tell when they’ve sufficiently restored the population, allowing them to de-list the species and let people get back to developing and using local lands as they see fit? Or is the tortoise merely a cat’s paw, its endless, ongoing preservation intended precisely to make sure neither large-scale development nor ranching can ever resume?
Government biologists assume tortoise numbers are on the decline – in the wild – based on their theory that the primary threats to the reptiles are habitat destruction and disease. But the little reptiles seem to enjoy a suburban “habitat” just fine. As of a few years ago, officials had rounded up more than 10,000 of them, right here in the Las Vegas Valley. Marci Henson of the county’s Desert Conservation Program estimated about 2 percent of those are euthanized after developing respiratory problems.
Ignoring the urban and suburban populations of the tortoise to call it threatened is like saying house cats are threatened because they don’t seem to survive long amongst the coyotes of the deep desert.
Back in the 1990s, native Las Vegan Harry Pappas served on the Clark County Tortoise Advisory Council. “They said the tortoise was threatened, so they had to fence off these huge areas and shut out all the cattle, which means no one is out there shooting the coyotes and the raven anymore,” Mr. Pappas recalled, back in 2001. “They said anyone who found a tortoise had to turn it in.
“So what happened? They got so overrun with tortoises being turned in that they told us they were going to have to start euthanizing them. I said ‘Hold on a minute, here. Euthanize them? Why don’t you just drop them out in the desert?’ They said, ‘Oh no, they’ll fight with the native tortoises that already live out there and they’ll kill each other, because all these lands are already at saturation levels.’ I said, ‘Which is it? How can they be ‘threatened’ or ‘endangered’ but now you tell us all these lands are at ‘saturation levels’ for tortoises?”
Cliven Bundy, the last cattle rancher in Clark County, reports that when the Kern River natural gas pipeline came through, a federally mandated tortoise population study was conducted. They found several times more tortoises per acre on the lands where the Bundys have water lines and tanks for their cattle than they found in the dry desert – and literally 10 times the tortoise population density right here in the Las Vegas Valley.
That makes sense. Early explorers found precious few tortoises in the arid Mojave. In the 1920s and ’30s, tortoise populations swelled to artificially high numbers as ranchers ran cattle throughout Southern Nevada, killing off the tortoises’ main predators: the coyote and the raven. When environmentalists succeeded in running the ranchers off the land, tortoise populations slumped back to historically normal levels.
A previous release of tortoises didn’t go so well. When 770 desert tortoises from Fort Irwin were placed in the open desert in California, 90 percent of the transplants were promptly devoured by predators, leading to the program’s suspension in 2008.
All of the tortoises released into the bleak test site landscape Friday had lived at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center. One wonders how the biologists would respond if these 60 tortoises, Lassie-like, promptly turned south and began plodding their way back to the beckoning green lawns of Las Vegas. Assuming they survive long enough to make the journey.
You paid $90,000 for this shell game at a time when the federal government is running a $1.1 trillion budget deficit and has $16 trillion in debt. If lawmakers really want to cut spending – not to mention protect desert tortoises – they should ax this waste of money.
