I can't say how many times I've had to stop and help a gopher tortoise to cross the road. It's always a wrong time wrong place situation for the tortoise. If they could only keep to digging their burrows and remaining safe. I guess even then they find themselves between a rock and a hard place literally. A friend sent me news about the practice of "entombment" where developers build on top of the burrows and the tortoises are left buried alive ultimately unable to dig through the concrete and asphalt laid on top of them. To spell it out more directly here is a quote from the article in The Washington Post, "Trying to dig out, day after day, but not being able to, it's got to be pretty horrible," said Matthew J. Aresco, a biologist at a 50,000-acre conservation area in Florida who helped bring the tortoises' cause to light. "It's truly appalling." This has turned out to be a win win situation as the fine the developer would have had to pay to bury the tortoises was more expensive then having them relocated. When it works out this way it makes for one less excuse when destroying the environment for the sake of development. Visit Nokuse Plantation for more information about the rescue effort. From the site: "Nokuse Plantation is 48,000 acre private conservation initiative in the Florida Panhandle conceptualized and funded by M. C. Davis and Sam Shine. It is designed to be both a model and a catalyst for future landscape level conservation projects, which is the only way to preserve nature’s intrinsic biodiversity."
November 07, 2007
Buried Alive
I can't say how many times I've had to stop and help a gopher tortoise to cross the road. It's always a wrong time wrong place situation for the tortoise. If they could only keep to digging their burrows and remaining safe. I guess even then they find themselves between a rock and a hard place literally. A friend sent me news about the practice of "entombment" where developers build on top of the burrows and the tortoises are left buried alive ultimately unable to dig through the concrete and asphalt laid on top of them. To spell it out more directly here is a quote from the article in The Washington Post, "Trying to dig out, day after day, but not being able to, it's got to be pretty horrible," said Matthew J. Aresco, a biologist at a 50,000-acre conservation area in Florida who helped bring the tortoises' cause to light. "It's truly appalling." This has turned out to be a win win situation as the fine the developer would have had to pay to bury the tortoises was more expensive then having them relocated. When it works out this way it makes for one less excuse when destroying the environment for the sake of development. Visit Nokuse Plantation for more information about the rescue effort. From the site: "Nokuse Plantation is 48,000 acre private conservation initiative in the Florida Panhandle conceptualized and funded by M. C. Davis and Sam Shine. It is designed to be both a model and a catalyst for future landscape level conservation projects, which is the only way to preserve nature’s intrinsic biodiversity."
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just watched a show last night covering the Maryland enviorment and one segment focused on the native terns, who were in your childhood, plentiful, but who are now in danger (though not officially "endangered"). Shore birds, their native habitat has been confinscated by development. As a result, they've been using the white pebbled roofs of municiple buildings to nest on, because they mimic the shell covered shores they're used to.
The segment showed a local school, Sparrow's Point, placing wire fencing on the roof so the baby terns wouldn't fall off the edge when fleeing gulls who cruise near by parking lots for chips and crisps before they take their terns.
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