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With a little help, desert tortoises are blooming in Twentynine Palms

From about mid-May to mid-September, the highs in the sun-soaked desert town of Twentynine Palms rarely dip below 90 degrees. The city is located in the Mojave Desert, about 140 miles east of Los Angeles and serves as a gateway to Joshua Tree National Park.

It’s an area where the Marine Corps., known for its toughness, established an Air Ground Task Force Training Command and Air Guard Combat Center.

Around the base the sounds of rumbling tanks and live explosives along with the sparse desert environment can paint a rough picture.

Yet, in that seemingly hostile environment, there is kindness.

It happens daily when fledgling, vulnerable desert tortoises exit their burrows upon detecting the footsteps of conservationist Brian Henen.

He tosses them handfuls of bok choy and snap peas. The feed will help the desert dwellers grow from their current stature — about the size of a deck of playing cards and easy pickings for predators — to fully grown and sturdy adults.

It’s a turtles boot camp that’s helping the tortoise survive and ultimately thrive in a habitat that would be permanently damaged without their presence.

Save the tortoise

My colleague Alex Wigglesworth detailed this survival story from the Marine base, site of the Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site.

The tortoises live in a sheltered habitat ringed by barbed wire and draped in netting.

The setup is designed to protect them from ravens, coyotes and other predators, along with the other harms a Marine base might present.

Some call this place Tortoise Gitmo, after the U.S. Navy’s Guantanamo Bay base and prison camp in Cuba.

Officially it’s called the Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site, and since it was established in 2005 it has helped scientists learn how to protect a species that’s threatened by human encroachment, disease and climate change.

What goes on at the site?

Initially, biologists gathered eggs from wild females and raised the hatchlings until they were hardy enough to stand a chance against predators and drought, in a process known as head-starting.

The facility got an influx of new tenants in 2017, when the military relocated tortoises to make way for a controversial expansion of the base’s training grounds. Biologists decided to head-start about 550 young tortoises that were taken from expansion areas.

Then, starting a couple of years ago, Henen’s team began gathering, incubating and hatching eggs from the relocated adult tortoises to study whether they were breeding with their new neighbors. Rather than release the hatchlings into the wild, where they were unlikely to survive, they decided to head-start them as well.

In desert tortoise head-starting programs, biologists use radio transmitters to monitor wild females and portable X-ray machines to determine when they’re pregnant. They bring those females inside enclosures to lay their eggs, then release them. The hatchlings are reared in captivity until they reach a certain length — Twentynine Palms uses a threshold of 110 millimeters, or about 4 inches long, which can take between seven and nine years — and then rereleased, typically with radio transmitters to monitor their health and movements.

Threats to the tortoise are everywhere

Desert tortoises were once so plentiful that people driving through the Mojave would take them home. But in some patches of California desert, their numbers have dropped by up to 96% since the 1970s, according to study plots monitored by Kristin Berry, supervisory research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center.

The Marines are hardly the only threat to tortoises. Roads and highways have carved up previously wide-open stretches of desert into parcels that are in some cases too small to allow for the breeding and genetic diversity needed to sustain their population health. A warming climate has dried up the precipitation needed to sustain them in some places.

Livestock not native to the desert have grazed and trampled the plants tortoises like to eat, spreading unpalatable nonnative grasses in their wake. Power lines have added miles of resting perches for ravens, allowing them to more easily spot young tortoises.

The desert would be forever changed without the tortoises

“The desert tortoise is considered a keystone species, which means that they have a disproportionate effect on the entire ecosystem,” says Henen, a civilian who heads the conservation branch of the base’s Environmental Affairs Division.

The tortoises pockmark the desert floor with burrows that other animals use for shelter, and disperse the seeds of native plants in their waste. “They’re influencing what else can exist on the landscape,” Henen said.

For more on the desert tortoise’s progress, check out the full article.

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Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team

Andrew J. Campa, reporter
Carlos Lozano, news editor

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