PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — They lived life on the wrong side of the tracks. Now almost 60 of Palm Beach County’s gopher tortoises, animals that move at a crawl, are going to be uprooted to help rail commuters make haste during rush hour, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.
The tortoises, a species of special concern in Florida, have to be unearthed from their tunnels on the west side of the CSX railway line hugging Interstate 95 so Tri-Rail can lay a second set of tracks there, Tri-Rail officials said.
The $456 million double-track effort, covering 30 miles from West Palm Beach to Boca Raton, will bury 100 tortoise burrows in a 100-foot-wide strip of railroad right of way, according to an environmental consultant for Tri-County Rail Constructors, the track builder.
While being railroaded out of their current habitat — land that shudders with each passing train — tortoises flanking the tracks won’t be left homeless. Tri-Rail is seeking a permit from the Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission to shuffle the shelled reptiles to suitable new tortoise turf: three scrubby nature preserves off Interstate 95 in Boynton Beach and Boca Raton.
Tri-Rail is taking the “high road” in relocating the tortoises, said spokeswoman Bonnie Arnold.
“The decision was made that, rather than entombing them, which would be within our legal right, we would preserve them,” she said.
It is a costly road, too: Tri-Rail will have to shell out $400,000 for the relocation, Arnold said. That includes $60,000 to make one of the receiving sites, the Blazing Star Preserve west of I-95 from Camino Real to Palmetto Park Road, more hospitable for 30 tortoises that may be transplanted there, said Erik Neugaard, a biologist for Keith and Schnars, the consultant overseeing tortoise relocation.
When tortoises stand in the way of development, builders have three choices: They can work around the animals, relocate them to approved natural areas or essentially pay to kill them, state wildlife officials said. The latter means they can go ahead with construction, provided mitigation money is paid to the state to buy new habitat, said Joan Berish, a wildlife commission biologist in Gainesville.
Gopher tortoises, which have shovel-like front feet, are on Florida’s list of imperiled species. Yet their status is not dire enough to keep them from being pushed frequently — and sometimes in large numbers — from their preferred haunts. They like the open patches of powdery sand, uncluttered prickly fields and the low plants and grasses of habitat called scrub. They’re found in sandhills, flatwoods, prairies and coastal dunes.
Consumption of their high-and-dry habitat by development has made railroad corridors — even with 312-ton passenger trains hurtling by — a substitute home for tortoises.
The rail corridor mimics what the sluggish reptiles seek in nature, said Steve Bass, manager of the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton. The steel rails and wooden ties follow ridges of their beloved high sand. Land adjacent to the track is kept cleared by railway maintenance crews, just the way wildfires burn off dense underbrush in their natural habitat. Tortoises can forage in the sunlight for the flowers, grasses and other plants they like, Bass said.
“They graze along the tracks,” he said.
There’s privacy, too. The tracks are posted No Trespassing, so the tortoises have some refuge there, Neugaard said.
“A lot of times that’s all they have left in developed areas,” Berish said.
Still, the barreling train traffic makes the corridor only an “acceptable” retreat for tortoises, not an ideal home, Neugaard said. And while most of the railway reptiles dig burrows safely away from the humped track bed, which is covered with rock, a few will excavate along the foot of that berm, creating tunnels that at times collapse, Neugaard said.
For the relocation, some tortoises will be teased from burrows, which run 30 feet long and 10 feet deep, using a simple trick. By pounding the ground just outside the burrow entrance, tortoises sometimes can be lured out of their holes to investigate the noise.
“Sometimes we get lucky and can grab them,” Neugaard said.
Others will be carefully dug out of hiding with a shovel or heavy machinery, he said.
The number of tortoises being transferred by Tri-Rail “is on the high side” but not unheard of, said wildlife commission biologist Ricardo Zambrano. “We’ve had similar numbers of tortoises being moved from large-scale development,” he said.
“I don’t think it will be a problem,” he said about winning state approval for the move. “They’ve consulted with us through the whole process.”
But Zambrano is concerned that one of the receiving areas, the county-owned 40-acre High Ridge Scrub west near I-95 and Hypoluxo Road, may be a location for tortoise poaching. The wildlife commission has no evidence of anyone snatching animals there to eat but “there’s few to no tortoises where you should expect there would be many,” Zambrano said.
Another release site for the Tri-Rail tortoises, the nearby Overlook Scrub, had a history of tortoises being taken, said David Gillings, a county environmental official. But there have been no signs of poaching there or at High Ridge since those lands were bought by the county and fenced for conservation, he said.
Gopher tortoises could be hunted legally until 1988, when the state prohibited all harvesting of the animals, nicknamed Hoover chickens during the Depression, Berish said.
“Before that we had bag limits,” she said.
Before Tri-Rail can gain final permission for the tortoise relocation, medical checkups must be performed on some of the reptiles. Workers are trapping animals so their blood can be tested for a potentially fatal upper respiratory infection that afflicts the species. Wildlife officials don’t want that pathogen passed on to other tortoises from the train-track group. So far tests on 35 tortoises have come back negative, Neugaard said.
It is becoming harder and harder to find places to relocate tortoises, wildlife officials say. Some managers of natural land don’t want new tortoises that might harm or disturb their existing populations, Berish said. Many sites that can receive them are full.
“We’re running out of places to put tortoises,” she said.