TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Tortoise Dug Out, Moved To New Digs

ADVERTISEMENT

By MIKE SALINERO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 25, 2007

TAMPA - A female gopher tortoise left her home territory at the periphery of Tampa International Airport on Monday afternoon bound for a much safer habitat.

The fully grown tortoise was found among five burrows that workers from Birkitt Environmental Services carefully excavated Monday morning. The burrows are on the future site of a new taxiway that the airport plans to begin building next month.

State wildlife officials recently reclassified gopher tortoises as a 'threatened species' that must be relocated from development sites. Before this year, tortoises were protected as a 'species of special concern,' and developers could pay a fee for permission to bury the animals in their burrows. State scientists last year recommended that the tortoises be given a higher protective status because of the continuing loss of habitat to development.

The female tortoise at TIA was relocated to Upper Tampa Bay Park, a Hillsborough County park near Oldsmar. Birkitt environmental specialist Luke Martinson said the park has good habitat for gopher tortoises. The park agreed to waive a fee for taking the animals if Birkitt will clean out undergrowth in the palmetto scrub to allow grasses to grow for the tortoises to eat.

It's not unusual to find only one tortoise out of five burrows, said Owen Sitton, a project scientist with Birkitt. Other tortoises could have been 'out and about,' he said, perhaps forced to leave their burrows by the weekend rains.

'They'll migrate a pretty far distance,' Sitton said. 'They can use three or four burrows.'

Melissa Green, an environmental scientist with Birkitt, said gopher tortoises can move between several burrows in a radius of two miles or more. They usually live one tortoise to a burrow. When they leave, the burrows are often occupied by other animals such as armadillos or snakes.

Birkitt workers located the burrows in June by walking back and forth in a gridlike pattern over the taxiway site. They used a Global Positioning System to record the burrows so they could be found later and excavated.

The tortoise burrows have only one entrance and can meander underground. Sitton starts the excavation by poking a long PVC pipe into the opening until it stops. Then he can tell backhoe operator George Hand how far to scrape.

Hand delicately removes less than a foot of dirt with his big steel bucket. Sitton, Green and Martinson follow up digging with shovels. They continue along all possible routes for the tunnel until they're satisfied no tortoises are present.

Gopher tortoises typically inhabit uplands, especially those with well-drained, sandy soils. But they also can be found in or around other habitats such as the pine-palmetto scrub at the airport's future taxiway site. Sitton said the tortoises like to dig their burrows near open areas where they can find grasses, their favorite food.

After the five burrows were excavated, the Birkitt workers took a walk around the site looking for stray tortoises. They'll do a more extensive search a week or so before bulldozers start clearing the land. Then they'll fence off the area so that no tortoises return to the burrows.

'They're tortoises, but they can go pretty far,' Green said. 'You don't want any more coming back in.'

Reporter Mike Salinero can be reached at msalinero@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-8303.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT