Poaching Gopher Tortoises In Florida

By Virginia Smith. Staff Writer Daytona News Journal, 2/6/04

Since 1988, when the last gopher tortoise was legally plunged into a Florida stew pot, there have been reports of gopher shells bearing the marks of butchering. A dozen in a backyard, a few in an abandoned citrus grove. But nothing like what Eric Holt saw last week in Leesburg. More than 200 tortoise shells, some whole and others shattered, were piled densely among rotting leaves and trash in some woods off U.S. 27. Holt's boss was cutting a road through the area when he stopped to call his employee, who breeds turtles as a hobby.

Holt quickly identified them as gophers, a state-defined "species of special concern" that developers can either relocate alive, or plow
over their burrows and pay into state-regulated "mitigation banks" of habitat elsewhere. Neither of these legal alternatives is cheap, and they can delay building projects for months. Many developers statewide take gopher matters into their own hands -- including, increasingly, in Volusia, say state officials. "Developers will apply for only five permits to mitigate or relocate and we know they've built on twice that many properties. Volusia is becoming one of the biggest places we're having problems like that --
especially Deltona and Orange City," said Kwami Pennick, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

But the Leesburg pile shows how chilling some homegrown solutions can be, and raises questions about whether laws to protect gophers aren't putting them in harm's way. Most of the tortoises in Leesburg, Holt said, were killed months ago. The outer layers of their shells had sloughed off, leaving bone and a bloom of greenish mold. Others were fresher. Someone skilled had hammered exactly two holes in each tortoise: one to knock out the front parts, one to dislodge the back legs. Those arm and leg bones, which support the fleshy, edible parts of the tortoise, were nowhere to be found. Wildlife officials have just opened their investigation, so it's
unclear how so many tortoises got there. But the state's top gopher tortoise scientist and a tortoise relocation expert both said it
looked like a commercial job -- someone was removing the meat to sell it. Worse yet, they said, such a large quantity of animals had probably not been pulled from their burrows the traditional way (using a hook and brute strength), but removed from bucket traps set by professional tortoise relocators, or even sold by the relocators themselves. Or, just as likely, they were trapped with the blessing
of a landowner wanting to avoid tortoise-related fees. "If I have a few acres I want to subdivide, I just might want to find me somebody who liked to eat tortoises. Because when it comes time to count the tortoises and choose whether to relocate or
mitigate, well, there are no tortoises," said Ray Ashton, who runs a relocation consulting firm in Alachua County. And relocation, done poorly, endangers the tortoises too, he said. "Basically, you might as well let them out on the highway.
There's no license needed, there's no follow-up by the state -- you could dump the tortoises and walk away. It happens all the time."
But relocation is widely seen as a humane option, and developers can pay upward of $350 for trapping, disease testing, and moving each animal off a property. "Right now the public thinks once a tortoise has been relocated it lives happily ever after," said Joan Berish, the Fish and Wildlife Commission's senior gopher tortoise researcher. But the state does not require protection on recipient sites, she said, only a letter from the landowner asserting the land will be kept suitable for gopher tortoises.

In January, a new state task force began looking at "all aspects of gopher tortoise mitigation, relocation and permitting," Berish said,
including the "ethics and competence" of those doing the relocations. "It's all going under the microscope," she said. The species' "special concern" status will also get a second look. Gophers are classified as threatened or endangered in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and pressure is building to change the classification here. Sights like the one in Leesburg might give the task force yet
another danger to consider. Poaching for food, Berish said, is hardly the biggest threat to gopher tortoises when tens of thousands have been lost to development. Still, she said, "you have to wonder how prevalent it is." And given the pile's size, she said, "I did wonder if there was some tie-in to a relocation." This week Holt revisited the pile and found things he hadn't seen before, like some tortoise neck bones, which he toed with his work boot. Chickens from a nearby property had laid eggs among the shells, and malt liquor bottles were everywhere. "Now we know what goes well with gopher," he said.

virginia.smith@news-jrnl.com