Sun editorial:

A welcome improvement

Area that once served mainly as a holding facility now home to tortoise research

Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

The Desert Tortoise Conservation Center south of Las Vegas has undergone a major transformation since it was created in 1990 mainly as a holding pen.

Today it is serving as a research center staffed by tortoise experts from the San Diego Zoo and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The goal is to restore tortoise habitat and bring back sustainable numbers of the burrowing turtles that have become a symbol not only of our own Mojave, but also of other deserts around the world.

Heavy development and recreational use of tortoise habitat, and a fatal upper respiratory tract disease affecting many tortoises, caused the animal to be federally listed as endangered in 1989.

Part of a subsequent rehabilitation plan fell to the Bureau of Land Management, which in Nevada has now set aside more than 940,000 acres where protections and improvements have been added to help the tortoises thrive.

The conservation center occupies 250 acres of an 11,000-acre BLM wildlife and desert-research management area. A few years ago Kim Field, a desert tortoise recovery biologist working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, recognized that the conservation center could do much more than receive and nurture at-risk tortoises, such as those removed from construction sites.

She envisioned a master plan for the center, one that would expand its mission to include research into all aspects of tortoise conservation. That, and an educational component to teach others about tortoises, has now been accomplished.

The San Diego Zoo has five full-time employees working at the site, and other zoo employees occasionally stop by to assist in research or medical procedures. On the zoo’s Web site, one of its tortoise experts writes about the importance of what is taking place at the conservation center: “The health of the desert ecosystem can be measured by the health of tortoise populations.”

The center’s staff has plans for giving tours to area schoolchildren and expanding its educational programs to adults as well. We are impressed with how the center has evolved and believe it will be of great benefit not only to Southern Nevada, but also to wherever desert tortoises are trying to survive.

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By Sunlizard

Sept. 29, 2009

8:15 a.m.

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Renewable Energy projects are being proposed for over 50 percent of the habitat for these creatures. It is a real ugly fact that the industrial green economy will upgrade the tortoise from Threatened to Endangered.

Will the Las Vegas Sun ever have the guts or common sense to address this issue?

You can put all the funding you want into research. These animals need habitat. There is not enough room for public land energy sprawl and the desert tortoise. Most research will tell you that. There are no short cuts or magic tricks to compensate for loss of habitat to green energy sprawl. No different than urban sprawl. Wonder how much money from energy developers will be used as mitifgation money to upgrade the place that used to be called "the tortoise concentration camp" from its own employees? It was called that because they exterminated up to 150 animals per month. When the housing sprawl displaced all those tortoises, they were taken to the concentration camp. Given an ELISA test to determine if they were positive for the respiratory disease, if they test positive, they are put down. Same thing will happen when several thousand acres removed at a time for these 4 to 5,000 acre renewable projects.

The healthy ones were moved to a place that those same employess nicknamed "the Dump Site". An area between Primm and Jean along highway 15 where thousands of tortoises were moved. Starting in the late 1990's, you can walk out there now and find shell after shell of tortoises that died out there.
By mred

Sept. 29, 2009

2:43 p.m.

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The solar sites should be in town. They can be built over freeways and parking lots, shading them and having the power where it is needed. The 15 could be covered with collectors.

I've seen some of the dumped turtles. Some of them had radio monitors that were glued on deforming their shells. The was not an effort to remove them before the batteries went dead.

It should be required that any new industrial or commercial buildings have solar collectors on their roofs.