The Desert Tortoise’s New Endangered Status
What does this mean for Twentynine Palms?
Did you know the city of Twentynine Palms sits between two vast desert tortoise preserves?
You know one of them as Joshua Tree National Park (759,156 acres), and the other is the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command and Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (596,288 acres).
Between these two reserves, tortoises feast on spring flowers, wander their territories, and push each other around, when they aren’t snoozing in their burrows nearly 90% of the time. They share their burrows with snakes, lizards, rodents, insects, and even burrowing owls, which makes them a keystone species, one that has a large effect on the environment and one that other animals and plants depend on. And the thing about a keystone? You pull it out and a whole ecosystem can collapse.
Tortoises live in the park and on the base but also on undeveloped private property in the city’s more rural areas. Residents who have spent their whole lives here report that tortoises were far more common forty or fifty years ago than they are today.
This reduction in the number of desert tortoises—a vast reduction statewide—led first to the listing of the tortoise as threatened by California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) in 1989 under the California Endangered Species Act and as threatened by the federal government in 1990 under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
After studies showed that the tortoise population plummeted 85 to 95% in the western Mojave between 1980 and 2014, in 2020, Defenders of Wildlife, the Desert Tortoise Council, and the Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee petitioned CDFW to consider changing the state listing from “threatened” to “endangered.” Following an exhaustive review by the CDFW, the department approved the uplisting of the Mojave Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii).
If we don’t act to stop plummeting tortoise populations, what is the next state listing for the desert tortoise? As Ed LaRue of the Desert Tortoise Council told the Desert Trumpet, the next step is extinction.
We can’t let that happen.
A hatchling tortoise enjoys a spring feast in the national park. Video by Kat Talley-Jones
Why Have Tortoise Numbers Fallen So Drastically?
Desert tortoises are very slow to reproduce and don’t reach maturity until their late teens. Even under ideal circumstances, many eggs and most hatchling tortoises don’t survive. Humans living, working, and playing in the desert have brought additional threats. The 233-page California Fish and Wildlife document1 declaring the tortoises’ status change outlines these threats:
Development of large-scale renewable energy projects
Expansion of military testing and training installations
Increased human population growth and activities in the California desert—“tortoise populations located immediately adjacent to expanding human communities have disappeared”
Unregulated off-highway vehicle use
Human activities such as increased trash for ravens to scavenge and building lofty power poles to perch on encourage the spread of ravens, who prey on tortoises
Invasion of non-native plants that replace greens eaten by tortoises
Hotter and more frequent fires resulting from the spread of non-native grasses
Cattle grazing that tramples vegetation and introduces invasive plants
All of these threats are amplified by climate change, and all of these threats exist in the Morongo Basin except for cattle ranching.
What Does the New Uplisting Mean for Twentynine Palms?
While there are no new regulatory changes or additional penalties with the tortoise’s change in status from threatened to endangered, it does add urgency to the need to protect them.
As of 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) can assess civil penalties of up to $29,751 for knowingly taking a threatened animal, such as desert tortoises. Criminal violations can result in fines of up to $50,000, imprisonment for up to one year, or both.
When the Desert Trumpet asked the Bishop office of California Fish and Wildlife how this listing would help tortoises, staff said steps that are being taken include:
Developing, supporting, and building partnerships to facilitate recovery
Protecting existing populations and habitat, instituting habitat restoration where necessary
Augmenting depleted populations through strategic programs
Monitoring progress toward recovery
Conducting applied research and modeling in support of recovery efforts within a strategic framework
Implementing a formal recovery plan
Many of these plans are in place, including a program run by MCAGCC Environmental Affairs Division at the Marine base that headstarts hatchling tortoises—caring for them until they are three to five years old, when their shells harden and they are big enough not to be eaten by ravens when they are released. The Living Desert Museum has a similar program. The approach is too new to know if it will work well, but it might give tortoises a chance.
The CDFW report notes, however:
Historical and current conservation and management efforts such as the prohibition on taking tortoises, creation of land use plans, required mitigation, and translocation and head-starting efforts have not proven sufficient to halt the population declines of desert tortoise.
How can the City of Twentynine Palms and its residents protect desert tortoises? Help preserve their habitat by respecting wildlife corridors and buffer zones with the national park.
The City can continue to encourage Gold Star food businesses that consistently close their dumpsters to discourage ravens from raiding them. In the future, utilities can be buried underground to deprive ravens of perches.
In addition, the City could ban mylar balloons; it’s a rare hike locally when we don’t find balloons tangled in creosote or cat’s claw. (Our record is 15 in one hike.) Tortoises see colors and to them, brightly colored balloons look like food. A wad of mylar can get stuck in a tortoise’s gut, causing it to slowly die of starvation.
Tortoises Can Be Moved, Right?
In several community meetings this year, developers of the Ofland/Yonder resort and the industrial-scale solar facility planned to be built by E-Group PS say they’ll move tortoises found on the properties they wish to use for their own profit.
City residents who live near these proposed projects know the comings and goings of local tortoises; this spring I walked with Mary Kay Sherry on ridges that E-Groups PS plans to scrape and flatten. These hills have been honeycombed by a robust population of tortoises that include everything from large males and females to tiny hatchlings. Mary Kay has been observing these tortoises for 17 years and feels deeply attached to them—as do most 29ers who have wild tortoises as neighbors who give them names like Fred and Ethel, Squiggles, and Jorge.
Can tortoises be moved successfully? In 2008, Fort Irwin, a U.S. Army post located about 130 miles north of here, moved hundreds of tortoises. Nearly half of them died. Since then, strategies for moving tortoises have become more sophisticated and the survival rate of translocated tortoises is higher—indeed, some researchers say relocated tortoises can boost populations.
A study by the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute showed that individual tortoises that had been relocated survived, at least for several years. Relocated males, however, did not breed successfully, ending their genetic and generational lines. The male tortoises might have used too much energy learning the lay of the lay of the land or the local males might have successfully kept the new males from mating.
Dr. Kristin Berry, a pioneering tortoise researcher, says, “In general, moving organisms from one area to another … is not a successful conservation action and may do more harm than good to conserved populations by spreading diseases … increasing mortality, and decreasing reproduction and genetic diversity.”
What’s Next for Our Tortoises?
Unless development can proceed cautiously in the Morongo Basin, our local tortoise populations may be wiped out. Tortoises will likely survive in Joshua Tree National Park and on the Marine base for a long time, but chances to ensure genetic diversity through interactions of tortoise groups will dwindle.
Even though Mojave Desert Tortoises have existed as a species for thousands if not millions of years, today they are not resilient and can’t respond rapidly to habitat loss and climate change.
And yet, as David Carroll—a naturalist, artist and winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant–observed of all turtles, “That little brain has a few hundred million years of history programmed into it. I think they’re soil scientists, botanists, hydrologists. They know about all these things. They know what to do. They’ve lived so long on this earth.”
And as Joshua Tree National Park’s website says, “Perhaps this long stint on Earth has given them plenty of time to consider wise living strategies, such as careful, slow-paced locomotion, a healthy diet full of greens, resting during winter and summer, the desert's most challenging seasons, and water conservation.”
Whether they are wintering in their burrows, or meandering slowly across our parcels, the tortoise is a much-loved icon of the Morongo Basin. Do we want to be the generation that allows the marvelous Mojave desert tortoise to slip from the endangered list to extinction?
Local groups involved in tortoise conservation:
Morongo Basin Conservation Association
National Parks Conservation Association
Twentynine Palms Band of Mission Indians
90 Miles from Needles podcast (episode: “The Tortoise Still Has a Chance”)
Here’s the link to the uplisting document. Be aware that if you click on it, a 7 MB PDF automatically downloads to your computer or device.
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It’s rare but we still do occasionally see tortoises in the Pipes Canyon Wash area east of Highway 247 (Old Woman Springs Rd). But we are seriously concerned about the ongoing and increasing off highway traffic in this area - in spite of it being a non OHV area. I would appreciate any ideas how to reduce traffic in this area.
I simply don't see any of the vegetation that is part of their diet.
So far this year there has been 2 rains totaling 1.32 inches. There is nothing on my 5 acre property that they can eat of which I know,