Tortoise rescue just a phone call away

Monday, Nov. 5, 2007 | 7:17 a.m.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS MORRIS

Here's your life, once you take the job. It's Saturday afternoon. Maybe your wife is in labor. Or it's your daughter's wedding. Your cell phone rings. It's them. You have 120 minutes to cross the valley. And if a highway patrolman stops you barreling down Blue Diamond Road, will he believe your answer to the question, "Where's the fire?"

"A desert tortoise is in danger," you say.

You're the 24-hour on-call desert tortoise biologist, in a rush to save one of the world's slowest animals.

With you on the job, Las Vegas has become even more of a 24-hour town.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority recently closed off its first-ever search for a firm with professionals who can supply such a service.

Someone with a degree in biology or environmental studies. Someone with 240 hours of experience spotting desert tortoise burrows, scat and tracks. Someone who knows how to pick up a tortoise egg without breaking it. Someone with a car or truck that can cross the desert in a hurry.

Why now, after years of supplying the service in-house?

It's the growth.

Derek Babcock, director of ground water resources for the agency and future boss of the on-call specialist, calls it "another of many examples of, 'Hey, we're building up against the mountains.' "

Most of that land, said Zane Marshall, manager of the Water Authority's environmental resources division, is owned by the federal government. And it's habitat of the desert tortoise - a protected species under several federal laws.

For at least the past 12 years, Marshall said, the Water Authority built so little on federally owned land that doubles as desert tortoise habitat that the agency's own staff could do what was needed to protect the tortoises.

That includes surveying sites for the burrows, scat and tracks, overseeing the building of fences to keep the tortoises from wandering onto construction sites and being available on an on-call basis to remove tortoises or their eggs from such sites.

Babcock's phone number was on a card that construction crews would get before starting Water Authority projects.

Did he ever run into any emergencies? Not really, he says - the problem is often more with the critters themselves.

"They kind of do whatever they want to do," he said. "They might lay under construction equipment, or they kind of get up and walk. They're unpredictable."

But now the Water Authority has to plan ahead, building reservoirs and pipelines for communities that don't exist but soon will.

And so, within the coming weeks, an environmental firm will be chosen to supply the Water Authority's go-to man or woman when it comes to making sure desert tortoises don't get harmed as the valley stretches. That person will earn up to $60 an hour for the task.

What the new biologist will face was underlined by Babcock's recent visit to the edge of a community in the southwest valley called, fittingly, Mountain's Edge. Except it's not on the edge, since there's more edge out there.

Babcock's pickup truck was parked at the end of Durango Drive, where it makes a 90-degree angle with Cactus Avenue. On the north side of Cactus, there are the Mountain's Edge houses still being built. On the south side, there are 12,630 feet, more than two miles, of fence. Behind the fence, there's desert.

Off to the west, there are large, yellow machines, a year away from filling a hole in the desert with 20 million gallons of water. Nearly two miles of pipe will lie underground to carry the water to the houses and buildings that will be built beyond Mountain's Edge. The water, Babcock said, will come from the valley's existing distribution system.

The fence - three feet of metal topped by four more feet of orange plastic netting - was Babcock's baby. He surveyed the site where the reservoir and pipes will be laid, determining it is "low-density habitat." That means you might run into from 10 to 45 desert tortoises per square mile, especially in the spring, when they're, uh, busy.

So the fence was built to make sure those tortoises wouldn't wander onto the road, where the pipe will be laid, or onto the site of the reservoir.

Everything about it was done with the tortoises in mind, including bending the metal at a 90-degree angle underground and piling a few inches of gravel so they don't burrow under the fence.

With the same trained eye as the on-call biologist, Babcock found a burrow. The young scientist led visitors off the road and into the creosote and Mojave Yucca landscape, demonstrating how his cowboy boots got worn. Near a thick clump of yucca, there's an oval hole. But it appears to be abandoned, since there are no tracks or scat nearby.

Then again, it would be difficult to find one anywhere, at any time.

That's because of the dirty little secret about these animals that is bound to make life a bit easier for our on-call swashbuckler: Desert tortoises spend up to 95 percent of their lives underground.