Las Vegas ‘tortoise gulag’ paroles last inmates

A desert tortoise crawls free after being released into the desert near Primm on Friday, Oct. 10, 2014. The Desert Tortoises Conservation Center which housed the tortoise, relocated its final 53 tortoises before the center is scheduled closing in Dec. (David Becker/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

JEAN — After years — perhaps a lifetime — in cushy captivity, desert tortoise No. 6349 spent his first five minutes of freedom hunched motionless under a bush in a rocky dry wash 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

Finally, as his human handlers backed away, 6349 poked his head out of his shell and started to explore his new home — slowly, of course.

He had no way of knowing it, but he marks the end of an era. He was part of the final batch to be set free in the wild before the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center shuts down for good in December, after more than 20 years at the southwestern edge of Las Vegas.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to close the 220-acre center last year, after its federal funding was eliminated. Since then, the center’s contract operator, the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, has been working with its partners to empty the facility, mostly by releasing healthy tortoises into the wild.

The center was caring for roughly 1,400 of the animals as recently as 18 months ago. Today, all that remain are about 50 adults awaiting shipment to a new exhibit at the Springs Preserve, a research facility in Battle Mountain and the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah.

Another 40 hatchlings born at the center will sleep through the winter in covered outdoor pens at the site and be released into the wild next year, said Mike Senn, assistant field supervisor with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Southern Nevada.

Senn said no tortoises have been euthanized — or will be — because of the closure of the center, though some animals have been humanely killed over the past two years because they were too sick to save.

He estimates that about 30 percent of tortoises that came into the center had to be put down for medical reasons.

Since 1989, the desert tortoise has been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The conservation center was established in the 1990s as a place for developers to put tortoises removed from job sites in booming Clark County, but it soon became the valley’s de facto shelter for unwanted pet reptiles.

Last year, the center announced it no longer would accept former pets and strays, which were pouring into the facility at a rate of about 1,000 a year, overwhelming its budget and research mission.

The center’s closure in two months will end what has, at times, been a troubled and patchwork effort to save the tortoise, even as researchers were trying to better understand the species and the reasons for its decline.

That led to mistakes.

During the center’s first decade or so, thousands of tortoises were euthanized under a policy that called for the destruction of any animal showing signs of a deadly upper respiratory tract disease considered a threat to the species. It was later learned that tortoises could test positive for the disease but never develop it, either because they had been exposed and recovered or because they could carry it without ever showing symptoms or passing it on. That led to a change in the disease protocol that dramatically reduced the number killed.

Senn said the center’s procedures for determining which tortoises to release have also improved greatly over time and so have survival rates. Early in the program, he said, “They were releasing whatever — anything that wasn’t dead.”

Longtime local conservationist John Hiatt said the center’s legacy will be decidedly mixed. He said “it seemed like a good idea” to have a holding area for tortoises that otherwise would be literally bulldozed in the name of development.

“But in the final analysis, it just wasn’t a long-term or permanent solution,” he said, especially after it became a shelter for a pet tortoise population far larger than expected.

The center has a nickname in the environmental community: “The tortoise gulag.”

“That’s what a lot of people referred to it as because tortoises went there and were put into little pens and that was it,” Hiatt said.

Friday’s release took place in an area west of Interstate 15 south of Jean known as the Large Scale Translocation Site. Of the more than 10,000 tortoises released from the conservation center since 1997, most of them have come to this 27,000-acre swath of federal land where the species’ population density is much higher than it would be under natural conditions, Senn said.

Federal officials and their state and local partners also have established other tortoise release areas at the base of the Spring Mountains south of Pahrump and in the canyons and desert south of Boulder City. A few years ago, a group of test subjects equipped with tracking devices was set loose at the Nevada National Security Site.

Studies conducted in recent years suggest former pet tortoises, even those born in captivity, survive in the wild at about the same rate as the natural population.

“It doesn’t take them very long to go out and be a real tortoise again,” Senn said. “They have that instinct.”

On Friday, it took about 25 biologists and volunteers less than an hour to release 53 tortoises. The crew spent longer driving to the site than it did emptying the animals from their plastic tubs.

No. 6349 was set free by Daniel Essary, a research assistant from the San Diego Zoo, who could find himself out of a job in December. Essary figures he has released roughly 250 tortoises into the Nevada desert over the past five years, and he noticed something familiar about the way 6349 reacted to its release by hiding in his shell.

It’s impossible to know for sure, but Essary said he would bet that 6349 wasn’t always a guest of the government or a backyard pet.

“I’m pretty sure he’s had his time in the wild before,” he said as he watched the tortoise begin to move.

Dozens of desert tortoise sterilized

By Caroline Bleakley
KLAS-TV Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS -- It might seem odd the desert tortoise, an endangered species, needs population control, but that's what wildlife experts are recommending.

A two-day clinic to teach veterinarians how to sterilize tortoises ended Thursday.

Wildlife experts say so many people have had desert tortoises as pets, the population has gotten of out control. The belief is if they work to reduce the amount of captive desert tortoises, it will help the endangered ones in the wild.

"What's happened is we have an unusual situation where we have too many in a captive situation and people have numerous tortoises and they breed. These desert tortoises won't be able to breed anymore after these surgeries," said Mike Senn, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Veterinarians like Mary Lee are learning how to sterilize tortoises at two-day clinic.

"I'd say it's pretty urgent," Dr. Lee said.

She frequently sees desert tortoises at her Las Vegas clinic because so many are kept as pets. The problem is they breed easily in backyards. It's difficult to tell whether they're male or female until they're at least 10 years old, and they can live as long as 100 years.

"We have a large number of tortoises from one individual. It started with three tortoises about 20 years ago and when we checked two weeks ago, he had 54," Senn said.

Because of budget cuts, the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center is closing at the end of the year. That means when tortoises aren't wanted as pets anymore, there's no place for them to go.

Senn says says about 70 tortoises are being sterilized at the clinic, but homes have only been found for half of them and they can't be released into the wild because they may spread disease to other tortoises listed as endangered since 1989.

The clinic is aimed at ultimately reducing the number of captive tortoises.

"When we have to manage the captive populations, like when we had them going to the center, it was a very, very high cost," Senn said.

The two-day sterilization clinic cost about $35,000. The funding came from Clark County. It's money raised through fees paid by developers when they build on desert land.

Desert tortoise doing just fine

EDITORIAL

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

The desert tortoise is so threatened, in such a fight for species survival, that it desperately needs birth control.

If you’ve read this page for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the federal government’s absurd efforts to protect a reptile that doesn’t need protection. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of desert tortoises live in Las Vegas Valley backyards or in pens as pets. But federal law is concerned solely with species populations that live in the wild. So the fact that desert tortoises breed, thrive and actually fare better as pets is a problem in need of fixing.

As reported Wednesday by the Review-Journal’s Henry Brean, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is inviting veterinarians from across the West to come to Las Vegas to participate in a two-day tortoise sterilization clinic. The public will pay for experts to teach the latest snipping techniques.

Hey, at least federal officials are no longer focused on killing the creatures they say they’re trying to protect — at one point, they were ready to euthanize surplus tortoises at their conservation center. But a far more cost-effective approach would be to remove the thriving creatures from the threatened species list altogether. Consider this problem solved. Leave the tortoises alone, already.

Sterilization clinic set for endangered tortoise

Mojave Max roams the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center in Las Vegas in 2009. A clinic later this month seeks to sterilize desert tortoises to prevent rampant backyard breeding. (John Gurzinski/Las Vegas Review-Journal file)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service officials will hold a clinic in Las Vegas later this month with an unusual goal in mind: curb the breeding of a federally protected species they are also trying to save.

The agency is inviting veterinarians from Nevada, Arizona, California and Utah to attend a first-ever desert tortoise sterilization clinic, a two-day event to teach new techniques that could help slow backyard breeding of the reptile.

Officials say the growing population of unwanted pet tortoises is a management problem, diverting resources from efforts to preserve the species in the wild.

Uncontrolled backyard breeding also threatens native populations because captive tortoises can carry diseases with them when they escape or are released illegally in the desert.

Nevada law allows just one pet tortoise per household, but the measure adopted last year grandfathered in those who already had more.

Sterilization is one way to bring the captive population under control, said Mike Senn, assistant field supervisor for the Fish & Wildlife Service in Nevada.

Senn said it can be “a really difficult issue” to explain to people, but it comes down to this: Simply breeding more tortoises won’t save the species in the long run if not enough is done to improve and protect natural habitat and address threats in the wild.

The clinic will be Aug. 27-28 at the Oquendo Center, a medical training and events venue off Eastern Avenue near McCarran International Airport. There, about a dozen veterinarians, most of them from Nevada, will receive hands-on training in new tortoise sterilization techniques from the experts who pioneered them: Dr. Jay Johnson of the Arizona Exotic Animal Hospital and two researchers from the University of Georgia, Dr. Stephen Divers and Dr. Laila Proenca, who used tortoises shipped from Nevada for their work.

Veterinarians trained at the clinic will be able to perform the procedures in their private practice and, Senn hopes, at future events where pet owners cab get their tortoises fixed for free — or at a reduced rate.

More than 50 tortoises will be sterilized during the clinic, and wildlife officials are seeking new post-op homes for the animals. The nonprofit Tortoise Group is handling the adoptions. Those wishing to adopt or learn more about tortoise ownership and care may do so through the organization’s website, tortoisegroup.org.

“The first-ever sterilized tortoises will be available for placement in early September, and we need about 50 good homes in Southern and Northern Nevada,” said Jim Cornall, executive director for the Tortoise Group.

Sterilizing tortoises was a complicated and invasive process, but Senn said new techniques are considered low-risk and effective.

“For the males it’s pretty straightforward” and can be done pretty much any time the animals are active, Cornall said. The work is “a bit more involved” for females and must be done when they are in breeding condition, generally in July and August.

Some of the tortoises to be operated on during the clinic came from a single crop of about 50 that were living in a local backyard until their primary caretaker died — exactly the sort of situation wildlife managers and tortoise rescue groups hope to avoid in the future.

Other patients will be provided by the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, a 220-acre facility established 20 years ago at the valley’s southwestern edge as a place for developers to put the federally protected animals after removing them from job sites in booming Clark County.

The center is the valley’s de facto tortoise shelter, taking in as many as 1,000 unwanted tortoises each year and racking up about $1 million in costs that otherwise could have been spent on research and recovery work, Senn said.

The Desert Tortoise Conservation Center will close at the end of the year, when its funding runs out.

Pet desert tortoises need homes

There's no place to take unwanted desert tortoises, a reptile that is endangered in the wild. Yet desert tortoises can’t simply be put in the desert because of the dangers of overburdening the already fragile desert balance with more animals than the system can support.

Staff Reports
The Record-Courier

It’s been a busy summer so far for Tortoise Group, the Las Vegas nonprofit group that handles pet desert tortoise adoptions in Nevada.

In spite of having adopted over a dozen tortoises so far in 2014, there are still scores of tortoises looking for new custodians. And with no place to take unwanted desert tortoises now, and the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center about to close at the end of the year, finding new custodians for the reptile that is endangered in the wild is a constant problem.

“Although some tortoises lose their homes due to foreclosure or death of their custodians, the major problem is backyard breeding,” Jim Cornall, Executive Director of Tortoise Group said.

“Pet tortoises can’t simply be put in the desert, because of the dangers of introducing disease into the wild population, or overburdening the already fragile desert balance with more animals than the system can support. We have to find homes for them.”

Tortoise Group is planning to hold two workshops in July in Gardnerville and Reno – and will be bringing desert tortoises along for those that chose to adopt, and have prepared their backyards, as a result of the first trip.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is assisting with funding for the efforts.

Over 150 people attended the two initial workshops, which were the beginning of Tortoise Group setting up a chapter in the capital region. The sessions led to new volunteers being recruited, and to several adoptions. Over a dozen adoptions have already taken place from tortoises already in the area, and around a dozen more tortoises will be going to their new homes in July.

Tortoises will be heading up to Reno on July 23, with assistance from the Nevada Department of Wildlife, with adoptions taking place the following two days. The first workshop is 3:30-5:30 p.m. July 26 at the Humane Society, 2825 Longley Lane, in Reno. The second workshop is 1-3 p.m. July 27 at the Cooperative Extension building, 1329 Waterloo Lane in Gardnerville.

“We were delighted by the response to the initial workshops,” Cornall said. “The people we spoke with and visited were so full of enthusiasm, and eager to be involved. We wanted to bring tortoises as soon as sufficient yards were prepared, and we also wanted to hold new meetings, both for the new members, and for anyone else who couldn't make those first workshops but might be interested in learning more about adopting a pet desert tortoise.”

For more information on desert tortoise adoptions, or the workshops, call (702) 739-7113 or email info@tortoisegroup.org

Delist desert tortoise

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
EDITORIAL

Being a desert tortoise truther these days can’t be an easy job.

For more than two decades, the shelled reptile, designated a threatened species, has received federal protection. The problem: desert tortoises are about as threatened as pigeons. Maybe even less so, a point further established by the Review-Journal’s Henry Brean in a report that announced an expansion of the Las Vegas-based Tortoise Group’s adoption program to Reno, Sparks, Carson City and Gardnerville.

Yes, there are so many desert tortoises that they need to be shipped out of the desert.

The tortoise truthers say that, while the number of pet tortoises has exploded, tortoises in the wild still need that protection. But any attempt to distinguish between wild desert tortoises and those on golf courses, in backyards or kept as pets is so politically expedient as to be nauseating. The fact is desert tortoises are everywhere — and pretty soon, with this new program, some won’t even be in the desert!

For years, as Mr. Brean reported, the U.S. Fish &Wildlife Service used to take in pets and strays at its Desert Tortoise Conservation Center on the valley’s southwestern edge. Officials put a stop to that in early 2013 because the flood of tortoises — as many as 1,000 a year — threatened to overwhelm the facility’s budget and damage its research mission: saving the wild population. Indeed, the center is expected to close by year’s end, it’s funding eliminated. And good riddance. The center’s mission was a solution in search of a problem.

In fact, over the years, government intervention on behalf of our fine shelled friends has done far more harm than good. The best example: In 2008, about 770 tortoises from Fort Irwin were released into the wild of the California desert —and 90 percent of them were quickly devoured by predators.

If desert tortoises can — and are allowed to — live in a garage in Sparks when it’s 10 degrees outside, then there is no need for government protection. It’s time to delist this animal and open up more land to productive use. The desert tortoise is not in any way a threatened species. That’s the truth.

Clark County officials lament spending $15.7 million on desert tortoises

A desert tortoise tries to escape from a container at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center in Las Vegas in this 2012 file photo. Under a state regulation set to take effect next week, pet tortoise owners will be allowed to keep one of the animals at a time.

By BEN BOTKIN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

The desert tortoise isn’t slow in going through money.

Clark County has spent at least $15.7 million since 2001 on efforts to protect the tortoise, which is listed as a threatened species by the federal government. Those efforts run the gamut from fencing to habitat restoration to sampling efforts to gauge the population.

County officials don’t have anything personal against the tortoise. But they also point to estimates that show some 50,000 desert tortoises are kept as pets in Clark County alone and openly question if the creature is as threatened as the federal government maintains.

“We’ve got people that are starving and such massive needs that we can’t keep pouring money into this,” commission Chairman Steve Sisolak said.

The broader issue of spending on the desert tortoise arose last week at the commission meeting during a routine approval of a $125,250 contract amendment with NewFields Companies for work in sampling the tortoise population at Boulder City Conservation Easement, an 86,423-acre area south of Boulder City.

Commissioners made it clear that they want to take a closer look in the near future at its multi-species habitat conservation plan, which was put in place in 2000. Under that plan, some $95 million has been spent on 78 species of protected plants and animals, including the tortoise. That figure includes the money spent on the tortoise.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service surveys of 11,200 square miles of tortoise habitat across the four-state range provide an estimate of 95,000 adult tortoises.

By using that figure as a basis for estimating the desert tortoise population of all the range’s habitat, the result is fewer than 295,000 adult tortoises across 25,900 square miles.

In Nevada, as many as 91,000 adult tortoises are estimated to be living in some 8,100 square miles of habitat, according to federal figures.

The desert tortoise was listed as threatened in 1989, forcing the county to come up with a way to allow future develpment while complying with federal requirements to protect the species.

In 2000, the county adopted a multi-species habitat conservation plan, which it administers for all local municipalities. That plan carries out measures to compensate for the loss of habitat, such as restoration and monitoring of species, including the tortoise.

Under the plan, developers pay a $550 per acre fee, which goes to the county’s Desert Conservation Program, said Marci Henson, assistant director of comprehensive planning for the county.

Henson said the plan has helped streamline the environmental permitting process for private property owners, saving an estimated $300 million since the program began.

Tortoises live in blackbrush and Mojave desert shrub. They have brown shells that can grow longer than 14 inches long. They spend much of their time in burrows, venturing out to eat wildflowers and other plants.

They also live a long time — more than 50 years in some cases.

So the federal government will be spending years watching the current generation of tortoises across southeastern California, Southern Nevada and parts of Utah and Arizona.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began its monitoring efforts in 2001. It will take 25 years, until 2026, to gain enough data from a generation of tortoises to see the full scope of changes brought about by efforts to aid the animal’s population.

As a result, officials will have to wait years to see the results.

“They have to survive 20 years before they even start producing babies,” said Roy Averill-Murray, desert tortoise recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “They’re not like rabbits.”

That effort includes looking at the overall long-term patterns and changes in the tortoise population, not just the current raw numbers.

Federal officials also say that pet tortoises aren’t part of the equation for classifying wild tortoises as threatened, as the pets can introduce diseases and genetic impurities if set loose.

The work on the deal approved last week involves sending teams out to look for tortoises and accompanying signs of the creatures and where they live. That entails looking for scat, bone fragments and burrows, said Ken MacDonald, a partner and senior environmental manager at Newfields.

Commissioner Susan Brager said at the meeting that there are more important things to spend much-needed funding on, such as helping young people succeed.

“We spend millions on certain animals and our youth do not get all the help they need,” Brager said.

In the end, it would be nice to spend the money on other things, Sisolak said.

As for the tortoises, they’ll still be counted in Clark County.

“They've survived on their own for centuries,” Sisolak said.

Desert tortoises should run from government

Sherman Frederick

By SHERMAN FREDERICK
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Apparently, desert tortoises don’t read the newspapers. They are in trouble. They receive federal protection.

Here’s my advice to desert tortoises in Nevada: Run for your lives! You don’t need protection by the federal government. You need protection from the federal government.

Ask wild horses how federal protection is working out for them. Can you spell “dog food”?

Let me tell you a story. It’s one I share with many Nevada families.

My family once lived at The Lakes in Las Vegas. In the 1980s, it was a spot-zoned community in the middle of nowhere. No other development in any direction. Summerlin was a pipe dream. Civilization ended at Rainbow Boulevard. In some places, you could even see wagon ruts.

From our house to the mountains was pure desert, filled with jackrabbits, lizards of all kinds, coyotes, a few kit foxes and, of course, desert tortoises.

Most days after school, the kids in the neighborhood, accompanied by our yellow lab, Chief, set out on excursions from which they’d bring back all kinds of creatures. We’d have to stand our sons at attention on the front porch and search their backpacks, along with every pocket in their jeans, to separate them from their prized chuckwalla or whiptail or whatever turned out to be the catch the day.

We missed a few. Nothing like sitting down to dinner and watching a desert creature scurry across the floor.

This band of suburban children group-hunting with a yellow lab produced desert tortoises almost weekly. When the smiling kids would bring the tortoises home, I’d try to tell them the reptiles were a protected species, and that the creatures needed to be returned to the desert before the FBI found out.

They’d cock a puzzled glance like only kids can, and say: “But dad, they are everywhere.”

“Obviously.” I’d say, “But they are still protected. Take them back.”

The irony could not be missed. The federal government may not be able to find enough desert tortoises, but our neighborhood kids sure could.

Anyway, after some 20 years of central government “management” of the desert tortoise in Nevada (and not to mention extra, unnecessary expense incurred by the homebuilding industry), we’re starting to get the picture that it’s all been a weirdly dumb exercise. My kids and the yellow lab could have testified to that.

The federal government is now planning to close the Las Vegas Valley’s desert tortoise refugee camp and release hundreds of them into the wild. I am not making this up.

I hope there’s enough room for them out there.

Support flows in for sick desert tortoises

In this Aug 22, 2013, photo, research Associate Pamela Flores conducts a health assessment on a desert tortoise at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center in Las Vegas. Federal funds are running out at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center and officials plan to close the site and euthanize hundreds of the tortoises they've been caring for since the animals were added to the endangered species list in 1990. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken)(Credit: AP)

BY HANNAH DREIER
Salon

LAS VEGAS (AP) — News that hundreds of threatened desert tortoises face euthanasia with the pending closure of a refuge near Las Vegas has generated a storm of reaction that has government officials scrambling to find alternatives and fielding offers from people wishing to adopt the reptiles or make donations.

The Associated Press reported this week that the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, which has sheltered thousands of displaced tortoises for 23 years, is scheduled to close in 2014 as funding runs out.

As the location just south of Las Vegas begins to ramp down, it is euthanizing tortoises deemed too unhealthy to return to the wild. Healthy tortoises won’t be killed.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desert tortoise recovery coordinator Roy Averill-Murray estimated last week that about 50 percent to 60 percent of the 1,400 tortoises that live at the refuge were sick. Such tortoises cannot be released into the wild because they could infect their healthy wild brethren.

The estimate prompted a public outcry and debate among the various agencies connected to the refuge about the number of at-risk tortoises. It also forced the agency to issue a statement assuring the public that no healthy tortoises will be killed but saying that euthanasia is the only option for many of the animals because they are sick. Fish and Wildlife also assigned four people to field calls and put a message about the situation on its spokeswoman’s answering machine.

Deputy Fish and Wildlife Service director Carolyn Wells said Wednesday that the 50 percent estimate of sick tortoises at the facility may be correct, but added that not all of the ailing animals will be killed. Some of them could potentially go to research facilities, she said, though she could not say how many, and she does not yet have commitments from biologists.

Fish and Wildlife operates the center in conjunction with the San Diego Zoo.

Allyson Walsh, associate director for the zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, said just 30 percent of the residents are receiving medical treatment, though some others have been quarantined and need new evaluations.

“The ones that don’t get better and that are sick and suffering will probably be euthanized because that’s the sensible thing to do,” she said.

She disputed the notion that budget cuts are forcing the reptiles to be put down. Although the center has housed sickly tortoises for years, Walsh said they eventually would have been euthanized anyway.

Walsh said sick tortoises cannot be adopted out and she has not been contacted by any researchers interested in taking in the sick animals.

“That’s a possibility but we wouldn’t transfer an animal to anyone who was doing destructive research,” she said.

The right thing to do for a sick animal is euthanize it, she said.

Seth Webster disagrees.

Webster, a 36 year old programmer from New York, created a Change.org petition that together with a similar one on the site has drawn more than 3,000 signatures. He said he is working with a Florida tortoise refuge that recently bought land in Nevada to see if Fish and Wildlife will transfer the tortoises, or at least let an outside evaluator decide which animals are so sick they should be killed.

“Animals have a very strong will to survive,” he said. “These tortoises live to 100 years. If we euthanize him, are we robbing him of 30 years? It doesn’t seem fair to euthanize them just because the tortoises are sick and someone ran out of money.”

Desert tortoises have made their rocky homes in Utah, California, Arizona and Nevada for 200 million years. But the prehistoric animal has some unfortunate evolutionary quirks, including a susceptibility to flu-like respiratory infections and difficulties settling in to new homes. They are also sensitive to change as the tortoises sometimes dehydrate themselves by voiding a year’s worth of stored water when handled.

These weaknesses have combined with widespread habitat destruction in the quickly developing Southwest to dramatically reduce the tortoises’ numbers.

The Bureau of Land Management has partially funded the conservation center through fees imposed on developers who disturb tortoise habitat, but when the housing bubble burst several years ago, that funding dropped far below what was needed to run the center.

“Here’s an upside to this. It’s gone international,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Jeannie Stafford said. “We have gotten hundreds of people saying they would like to adopt. Thousands of people signing petitions. It’s been people wanting to help us with the situation.”

But most of the would-be tortoise Good Samaritans cannot actually adopt the animals. Federal laws intended to protect the reptiles ban their transportation across state lines.

People who live in Nevada can adopt the slowpokes through the Desert Tortoise Group. But they should know that owners who kill or release their long-lived pets could face prison time.

The Humane Society of the United States is setting up a fund this week for out-of-staters who want to help but cannot take a tortoise home.

Despite the overwhelming response, the Bureau of Land Management is not reconsidering its plan to pull funding that goes toward the center’s $1 million annual budget.

“Although it’s wonderful that people want to give money, it won’t change the outcome for the Desert Conservation Center,” BLM spokeswoman Erica Haspiel-Szlosek said. “There just isn’t money to keep it going, nor is it really the best use of conservation funds.”

The agency plans to redirect the $810 fee that developers pay for each acre of tortoise habitat they disturb to environmental preservation efforts.

The center has historically taken in about 1,000 tortoises a year, but will stop accepting new residents in coming months.

Tortoise rescue in Hi-Desert investigates Nevada kill-off

A male desert tortoise that is about 40 years old was rescued by the Joshua Tree Tortoise Rescue and is held by director Rae Packard. (Omar Ornelas, The Desert Sun)

Hi-Desert Star
Staff report

MORONGO BASIN — The headline read, “Hundreds of desert tortoises to be euthanized by 2014 at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center just outside Las Vegas.”

“My heart just sank,” Rae Packard, executive director of the Joshua Tree Tortoise Rescue, said after hearing the news. Since then, Packard says her rescue line has been ringing non-stop.

“At first, people thought it was us,” Packard said. She has had to explain that the tortoises marked for death are in Nevada.

Not believing the numbers, Packard called the man who was interviewed for the story, Roy Averill-Murray, head of the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center.

Averill-Murray told her while the situation is dire, the numbers in the article were exaggerated, and only six tortoises are scheduled to die. Averill-Murray said those tortoises have been diagnosed with upper respiratory disease syndrome and are failing to thrive.

When Packard asked if she could pick up those tortoises and rehabilitate them at her facility, Averill-Murray said both Nevada and California state laws absolutely prohibit the interstate transport of desert tortoises.

“The fear is that if they escape from a rescue facility or adoptive home, the sick tortoises may contaminate healthy ones,” Packard explained.

She heard surreptitious talk of an underground movement to take the tortoises, Packard said by phone Wednesday. However, she cautioned no one should get involved in something like that. Transporting desert tortoises across state lines is a federal offense, and the fines reach into the tens of thousands of dollars.

“I know that it’s an important law that went into effect to protect what is remaining of an already declining tortoise population,” Packard said, “But I believe an exception should be made in this case, especially if a cure for URDS is possible. That’s why the tortoise adoption programs were invented.”

Packard encourages those who have been moved by this story to reach out to federal legislative officials to urge them to continue funding the conservation center and to state officials to suspend the interstate transport law to stop this life-or-death crisis.

Conservation Center Tortoises Will Be Released

Desert tortoises are threatened by their own conservation center. (Desert Tortoise Conservation Center)

CBS KXNT

Las Vegas – Southern Nevada’s 17-year-old Desert Tortoise Conservation Center will close by the end of 2014 as the funding that supports it dries up.

There are 1,400 desert tortoises living at the center, where management and wildlife officials were scrambling on Monday to correct the misconception that the animals will be euthanized on a large scale.

Jeannie Stafford of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the national press misreported the center’s intentions. The center is working to get some of the tortoises adopted through the humane society. Some could go to private land that can accommodate them, the remainder, if they are healthy, will be released into the wild.

The center has so many tortoises because people find them and take them home as pets, only to have a change of heart later.

Stafford urges parents, kids, and anyone else who might get the urge to adopt — if you see a tortoise in the wild, it’s best to leave it there.

Desert tortoise faces threat from its own refuge

This Aug 22, 2013, photo, shows tortoise pens at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center in Las Vegas. The center is scheduled to be shut down due to lack of funding. Federal funds are running out at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center and officials plan to close the site and euthanize hundreds of the tortoises they've been caring for since the animals were added to the endangered species list in 1990. (Isaac Brekken, Associated Press)

By Hannah Dreier
Deseret News / Associated Press

LAS VEGAS — For decades, the vulnerable desert tortoise has led a sheltered existence.

Developers have taken pains to keep the animal safe. It's been protected from meddlesome hikers by the threat of prison time. And wildlife officials have set the species up on a sprawling conservation reserve outside Las Vegas.

But the pampered desert dweller now faces a threat from the very people who have nurtured it.

Federal funds are running out at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center and officials plan to close the site and euthanize hundreds of the tortoises they've been caring for since the animals were added to the endangered species list in 1990.

"It's the lesser of two evils, but it's still evil," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desert tortoise recovery coordinator Roy Averill-Murray during a visit to the soon-to-be-shuttered reserve at the southern edge of the Las Vegas Valley last week.

Biologists went about their work examining tortoises for signs of disease as Averill-Murray walked among the reptile pens. But the scrubby 220-acre refuge area will stop taking new animals in the coming months. Most that arrive in the fall will simply be put down, late-emerging victims of budget problems that came from the same housing bubble that put a neighborhood of McMansions at the edge of the once-remote site.

The Bureau of Land Management has paid for the holding and research facility with fees imposed on developers who disturb tortoise habitat on public land. As the housing boom swept through southern Nevada in the 2000s, the tortoise budget swelled. But when the recession hit, the housing market contracted, and the bureau and its local government partners began struggling to meet the center's $1 million annual budget.

Housing never fully recovered, and the federal mitigation fee that developers pay has brought in just $290,000 during the past 11 months. Local partners, which collect their own tortoise fees, have pulled out of the project.

"With the money going down and more and more tortoises coming in, it never would have added up," said BLM spokeswoman Hillerie Patton.

Back at the conservation center, a large refrigerator labeled "carcass freezer" hummed in the desert sun as scientists examined the facility's 1,400 inhabitants to find those hearty enough to release into the wild. Officials expect to euthanize more than half the animals in the coming months in preparation for closure at the end of 2014.

The desert tortoise is a survivor that has toddled around the Southwest for 200 million years. But ecologists say the loss of the conservation center represents a harmful blow in southern Nevada for an animal that has held onto some unfortunate evolutionary quirks that impede its coexistence with strip malls, new homes and solar plants.

Laws to protect the panicky plodders ban hikers from picking them up, since the animals are likely dehydrate themselves by voiding a year's worth of stored water when handled. When they're moved, they nearly always attempt to trudge back to their burrows, foiling attempts to keep them out of harm's way. They're also beset by respiratory infections and other illnesses.

No more than 100,000 tortoises are thought to survive in the habitat where millions once burrowed across parts of Utah, California, Arizona and Nevada.

The animals were once so abundant that tourists would scoop them up as souvenirs. Many quickly realized the shy grass-eaters don't make ideal pets. (For one thing, they can live for 100 years.) And once the species was classified as threatened on the endangered species list, people rushed to give them back.

Former pets make up the majority of the tortoises at the conservation center, where they spend their days staring down jackrabbits and ducking out of the sun into protective PVC piping tucked into the rocky desert floor. Most of these animals are not suitable for release, either infected with disease or otherwise too feeble to survive.

Averill-Murray looks as world-weary as the animals he studies. He wants to save at least the research function of the center and is looking for alternative funding sources.

"It's not the most desirable model to fund recovery — on the back of tortoise habitat," he said.

Tortoise center wants out of the shelter business

Mojave Max, Nevada's most famous desert tortoise, roams the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center in September 2009. (Las Vegas Review-Journal File)

By Henry Brean
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

After years of taking in people's unwanted pets, the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center at the valley's southwestern edge is desperately trying to get out of the shelter business.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials announced Tuesday that the federal facility has discontinued its pickup service for pets and strays, which literally gobbles up resources meant for research and recovery work.

Instead, the center is teaming up with the Animal Foundation to develop a new tortoise drop-off and adoption program through the foundation-operated Lied Animal Shelter.

The Fish and Wildlife Service simply doesn't have the funds to take in and care for more than 1,000 unwanted tortoises a year, said Ted Koch, who heads up the agency in Nevada.

"We aren't picking them up anymore, and we do not want to take them in anymore," Koch said. "We cannot take them in anymore."

Lied Animal Shelter was already accepting desert tortoises as part of its mission to take in "anything anyone brings to us that's an animal," said Betsy VanDeusen, development manager for the Animal Foundation.

Clark County's largest animal shelter would serve as the main drop-off point for unwanted tortoises that would otherwise end up at the conservation center.

That's the goal anyway.

Koch acknowledged the change could result in more pet tortoises being dumped into the open desert by their owners, even though doing so is "illegal, unwise ecologically and cruel."

"Unless you do it at the right place at the right time, it's likely to end in an unpleasant death for the tortoise," he said.

The conservation center was established 20 years ago as a place for developers to put the federally protected animals after removing them from job sites.

The San Diego Zoo now manages the center under a 2009 partnership with the Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies.

Koch said shelter work takes time and money away from the facility's core missions of research, education and the controlled release of tortoises into the wild, but there is another reason the community needs to transition away from using the center as a care home for unwanted animals. He said the conservation center only has funding for the next two years, and its future is unclear.

VanDeusen said the Animal Foundation is now developing an adoption program in consultation with the center. The details are still being worked out, but the idea is to let people adopt male tortoises only in an effort to curb backyard breeding.

The program should be up and running later this year, she said. Until then, Lied will take in as many tortoises as it can and turn the rest over to the conservation center.

No healthy tortoises will be euthanized by Lied or anyone else, at least not yet.

Koch said he can't rule that out down the road if funding continues to shrink and no solution can be found to "stem the flow of unwanted pet tortoises."

Some estimate there could be as many as 150,000 captive desert tortoises in the Las Vegas Valley alone. Koch couldn't vouch for that number, but he said there isn't much to stop their numbers from skyrocketing in a backyard setting with ample food, water and protection of predators.

Tortoises lay up to a dozen eggs at a time precisely because so many of the hatchlings don't survive in the wild. In captivity, the number of eggs is the same but the survival rate is far higher.

Koch knows it sounds strange for the agency charged with saving the desert tortoise to actively campaign against more breeding of the animal. But he said one of the fundamental purposes of the Endangered Species Act is to conserve the ecosystems on which species depend, "and raising individuals in captivity does not meet that purpose."

No other federally protected species is so widely kept as a pet, Koch said. "It's unique in the country."

In addition to the collaboration with Lied, the Fish and Wildlife Service is exploring a possible partnership with the Humane Society or other animal group to offer tortoises for adoption nationwide.

Ultimately, Koch said, the agency is open to any ideas that might help keep the state reptile of Nevada from stacking up at shelters while officials try to figure out how to preserve it in the wild.

Save the habitat, kill the turtles

Opinion: VIN SUPRYNOWICZ
Las Vegas Review-Journal

When -- in the name of heaven, I demand to know -- are those responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act going to do something about remediating the habitat devastation and starting to recover the minuscule remaining population, before it has dwindled past the point of no return, of that brave and noble beast, the poodle?

What? Are you serious, Vin? There are, like, 68 million domestic pet dogs in this country, and the poodle is the seventh most numerous breed. There are millions of poodles out there.

As a matter of fact, purebred poodles are among the 4 million to 6 million dogs euthanized in America each year because homes can't be found for them. America's dog and cat problem is not species extinction; it's overpopulation.

Well, to anyone tempted to respond in that manner, let me clarify for you what the Endangered Species Act is really all about. You see, the number of poodles living in domestic captivity doesn't count. Once we have succeeded in getting the noble poodle listed as threatened or endangered -- as it most certainly is, in the traditional range of its wild habitat -- all that will matter is the number of wild, untouched acres set aside. Once you've developed a house and a yard and put two happy poodles in it, for purposes of the federal ESA, you might as well have just shot the pups, because you have destroyed wild poodle habitat, and we are going to count your poodles as "taken," meaning dead. In fact, we may have to take steps to stop you from allowing them to breed, up to and including "euthanizing" your captive slave dogs, since "Unlimited breeding of an endangered species in captivity is something the community has to look into."

You think I'm making this up? Here in Las Vegas, Clark County's Desert Conservation Program -- a well-paid division of the county Department of Air Quality and Environmental Management -- is currently going hat in hand to the appropriate chain of federal agencies, asking "permission" to amend the so-called Desert Tortoise (and 77 other critters, including bugs and mosses) Habitat Plan, with the purpose of "allowing" the county to develop an additional 215,000 acres of adjoining stinking desert in the decades to come.

The theory, you see, is that any human activity which "moves dirt" destroys tortoise habitat, and cannot be allowed unless developers obtain federal permits for the "incidental take" of tortoises (regardless of whether a single tortoise is seen or killed), including a fee or fine of $550 per acre, which is used to build "tortoise fences" to keep the turtles from crossing the road to get to water, and so forth.

Wow. Under that theory, there must be practically no tortoises left in the Las Vegas Valley, which has now been heavily developed for decades. Right?

Actually, officials have rounded up more than 10,000 of the little buggers, right here in the Vegas Valley, turning them over to the Fish and Wildlife's Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, where they and their progeny are farmed out as pets, or for experiments. Those that aren't euthanized for having runny noses, you understand. Marci Henson of the county's Desert Conservation Program estimates about 2 percent of the poor little "threatened" reptiles get "euthanized."

("Run, little tortoises, run!" as former County Commissioner Don Schlesinger once put it.)

Sometimes, on a Saturday morning, I drive around this town, visiting garage sales. I've seen quite a few kids playing with their desert tortoises in their driveways. Cliven Bundy, the last cattle rancher in Clark County, tells me when the Kern River pipeline people came through and did a federally mandated tortoise population density study as part of their required Environmental Impact Statement, they found several times more tortoises per acre on the lands where the Bundys have water tanks for their cattle than they found in the hot, dry desert -- and literally 10 times the tortoise population density -- the highest densities recorded -- right here in the Las Vegas valley.

This isn't even counterintuitive. Early explorers found precious few tortoises in the dry Mojave desert, where the toothless reptiles struggle to find enough water and edible tender shoots. The Spaniards found only shells and thought them extinct. These animals developed in an ecosystem which had large toothy vegetarians -- deer, elk, whatever -- to crop back the brush, a role now filled only by cattle.

In the 1920s and 1930s, tortoise populations swelled artificially as ranchers ran cattle on these lands and killed the tortoises' main predators, the coyote and the raven.

As "environmentalists" have succeeded in running the ranchers off the land, the cattle have vanished, no one is any longer shooting coyotes and ravens, and thus tortoise populations have slumped back to historically normal levels.

Are there now more tortoises, or fewer, than when cattle grazed the land? How many tortoises are there? Fish and Wildlife is still working to establish a "baseline population number," Ms. Henson replies.

Twenty years after the tortoise received an "emergency listing" as a threatened species in 1989, they're still trying to establish a "baseline"? So when will they be able to tell us whether we have enough new tortoises, bred in their joyous cattle-free paradise, to de-list the species and allow humans to get back to developing our land as we see fit? Eighty years from now? Eight hundred?

Twenty years and no one has done a simple control experiment, releasing 300 tortoises on Cliven Bundy's grazed land with its water tanks and cattle, and another 300 tortoises on an adjoining dry, desolate and cattle-free valley, coming back three years later to count which valley has more tortoises and which seem healthier?

All this bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo is based on the presumption that any "human interference" with the dry and stinking desert ruins it as tortoises habitat, when the truth -- that tortoises actually do much better with people around, just like roaches and pigeons and hummingbirds -- stares us right in the face.

Cue "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Remove the blindfold, please. No, Mr. Tortoise, you haven't died and gone to heaven. We call this ... a golf course.

If they really wanted more tortoises, any old desert rat can tell them the solution is to shoot ravens and coyotes. Mind you, I'm not recommending that. We've got plenty of tortoises right now.

These people don't care about tortoises -- they're euthanizing them, for heaven's sake. The tortoise -- or whatever moss or bug or flycatcher eventually takes it place -- is merely a stand-in, a cat's paw, to give federal bureaucrats and their lunatic green pals complete control over development of private land in the West.

Just how fecund are those 10,000 captive tortoises, I asked Marci Henson.

"Oh, we think a lot of those ten thousand were pet tortoises, we believe as few as 2 percent may have actually been wild."

How can they tell -- the turtles came in wearing little knitted sweaters and booties? They keep trying to sit up and shake hands?

Besides, Ms. Henson said, quite seriously, "Unlimited breeding of an endangered species in captivity is something the community has to look into."

"To stop it?" I asked.

"Yes," said Marci Henson.

It’s spring in Las Vegas: Mojave Max emerges

By Jeff Pope
Las Vegas Sun





Mojave Max. (BLM)


The temperature topped 80 degrees in Southern Nevada on March 18 and Major League Baseball opened the season on Sunday.

But it didn’t officially become spring in the Las Vegas Valley until Tuesday when Mojave Max, the desert tortoise, emerged from his burrow at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center. Clark County’s prognosticating weather tortoise emerged officially at 2:37 p.m.

This was the first emergence of the current tortoise known as Max. The previous tortoise died June 30 at an estimated 65 years of age.

The current Max is a male, about 19 years old, that was picked up along Interstate 15 and turned in to the Gabriel Humane Society in California.

Like other Southern Nevada reptiles, he enters a burrow to brumate -- the reptilian form of hibernation -- every winter and emerges when temperatures are right and the days are longer.

Mojave Max has emerged as late as April 14 and as early as Feb. 14 in past years.

Clark County has sponsored a Mojave Max emergence contest so school children can guess when the tortoise will leave his burrow in the spring.

The entries are being tabulated and the official winner will be announced soon. The winning student will receive a year-long pass to federal parks and a laptop computer. The winner’s entire class will receive a field trip to Mojave Max’s habitat, Mojave Max Olympic-style medals and T-shirts, while the winner’s teacher will receive a laptop computer.

Mojave Max Still Hiding

Winter To Continue In Las Vegas Valley



KVVU News and Richard Lake
Las Vegas Review-Journal



Mojave Max, a desert tortoise estimated to be 19 years old, sleeps in his temporary den -- a plastic pipe at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center. Photo by Gary Thompson.

LAS VEGAS -- Punxsutawney Phil has confirmed it on the East Coast, and the lack of Mojave Max's appearance has confirmed it on the West Coast -- winter will continue.

Max, the famous desert tortoise who serves as a Clark County mascot of sorts, lives in the ground from about Halloween each year until spring. He's staying at the conservation center, near Mountain's Edge in the far southwest valley, because his regular home at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area is being renovated.

To help the county determine when Max will appear, they will hold the Mojave Max Emergence Contest. Students are encouraged to study the behavior of desert tortoises and guess when Mojave Max will first exit his burrow each year.

When he comes out depends on a few things. An internal clock. Flowers, maybe. Temperature and sunlight.

Which is where the Groundhog Day connection comes in.

Ten years ago, Clark County officials started pushing Max as an alternative to the eastern groundhog. He is better, they contended, at alerting us busy humans to the onset of spring.

There is no shadow involved. No silliness. Just some scientists and a hole.

When Max comes out, it's springtime. Before that, it is winter. This usually happens in March or April.

This publicity stunt -- and everybody knows that's what it is -- has an educational element. Schoolchildren have been recruited to guess when Max will come out. The student with the closest guess wins a prize.

This contest allows conservation officials to push their message, namely that Max, part of a threatened species, matters in the whole scheme of things.

The contest and educational campaign has been such a success, said Christina Gibson with the county, that it's been replicated in California with that state's own version of Max.

Some astute readers might be saying to themselves, "Hey. Didn't Mojave Max die last year?" In fact, he did. The old Max died of what is thought to be natural causes at the estimated age of 65.

A new, younger, handsomer Max with an inspiring backstory took his place. The new Max carries on the tradition of his predecessor in indicating the start of spring.

So anyway, it is one scientist's job to drive his 4x4 out to Max's habitat every day. He peeks into the hole where Max lives to make sure he's still living there.

When Max emerges, the scientist will record the event for the schoolchildren's contest.

Which could be any day now. Today, for example. Or Wednesday. Maybe Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Monday ...

The scientist will repeat this routine, every day, for as long as necessary.

Mojave Max tortoise successor chosen

By Mary Manning
Las Vegas Sun





Mojave Max.



A 10-pound successor to the Mojave Max legacy at the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area has been selected to carry on educating people about their role and responsibility in the health of the Mojave Desert.

The new Mojave Max is a healthy 19-year-old male who will carry on the tradition of predicting spring-like weather conditions in Clark County, which is part of the Mojave Desert.

For now, Mojave Max will be temporarily housed at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center until he can be moved to the Red Rock center in 2010 after remodeling, the Bureau of Land Management said today. The Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is not open to the public because rescued and quarantined tortoises are kept there.

Clark County has sponsored a Mojave Max emergence contest so school children can guess when the tortoise will leave his burrow in the spring. The contest will continue on schedule.

The new Mojave Max's age is estimated at 19 years old, a youngster in tortoise ages. Desert tortoises can live longer than 50 years.

In August 2005 Mojave Max was turned into Clark County. No one knows where he came from, but he might have been a backyard pet, the Bureau of Land Management said.

Mojave Max was picked up along Interstate 15 and turned into the Gabriel Humane Society. In turn, the California Turtle and Tortoise Club was contacted and he was returned to Southern Nevada.

On June 30, the first Mojave Max died of natural causes at an estimated age of 65 years old at the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

The Mojave Max Emergence Contest encourages students to study the conditions of the Mojave Desert and the behaviors of desert species and then predict when the live Mojave Max will emerge from his burrow each spring. The original Mojave Max emerged as early as Feb. 14 and as late as April 14 during his nine-year tenure.

The 2009 Mojave Max Emergence Contest will start and emergence predictions will be accepted from Clark County school students beginning Nov. 1 at www.mojavemax.com.