A gopher tortoise emerges from its burrow. In the Depression they saved starving Floridians but now they’re the ones that need saving. (Photo via Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.)
What would you say are some hallmarks of longtime Floridians?
As a Florida native, I’d say a love of our plentiful outdoor wonders, an appreciation for the frequent absurdity of our news headlines, and a deep skepticism about everything that looks too good to be true. We’re skeptical because so much of Florida is either a sham or a scam.
Think about it. The Seven Mile Bridge isn’t really seven miles long. We call ourselves the Sunshine State even though some of our cities are rainier than famously soggy Seattle. And while our governor repeatedly calls us “the Free State,” his definition of freedom doesn’t include people who disagree with him.
Thus, when I first heard about The Tortoise Conservancy, I admit to raising an eyebrow.
The Tortoise Conservancy is all over social media right now, their sponsored posts popping up on Facebook, Instagram, you name it. They claim to be all about saving Florida’s poor imperiled gopher tortoise — with your help, of course.
In fact, their website, spelled out, is “save the tortoises dot com.”
Among the people surprised and confused by these ads: Longtime gopher tortoise biologists.
“This thing is odd,” Jeff Goessling, an Eckerd College biology professor, told me this week. “I’ve seen the same viral online social media presence and have scratched my head a lot.”
And George Heinrich, who’s been studying tortoises for more than 30 years, said he initially confused the Tortoise Conservancy with a much larger international organization called the Turtle Conservancy. Now he wonders if the confusion was intentional.
When he mentioned the name to other biologists at a recent gathering of gopher tortoise experts, “hardly anyone knew them,” he told me.
When he checked out their website, he noticed they were offering donors special T-shirts featuring a line about being “turtley” from a silly Dana Carvey movie.
“That doesn’t seem very serious to me,” he said.
One tortoise expert I spoke to, Chase Pirtle of the Ashton Biological Preserve near Gainesville, went even further.
“It’s a developer teamed up with an environmental [consulting] firm,” Pirtle told me. “It’s ridiculous.”
Tortoises could use a hand
Florida’s tortoises DO need saving.
During the Great Depression, the tortoises helped hungry Floridians survive. They became known then as “Hoover chickens,” a grim joke about the Republican Party promise of a chicken in every pot.
Now they’re the ones who need help surviving. They’re considered a threatened species in Florida.
Although they have faces only another tortoise could love, their survival is important for more than just their own kind of shelled reptiles. Their burrows offer refuge for 300 additional species, some of which are endangered.
Unfortunately, tortoises like to build their homes in the same sandy spots where developers love to build things too. This is why they’re constantly winding up in the way of new subdivisions, stores, offices, and other human intrusions on the natural landscape.
For 16 years, Florida used to allow developers to write a check to the state and then run their bulldozers right over the tortoise’ burrows, sealing all the wildlife inside to die.
The state handed out 105,000 of these “incidental take permits” — a better name would be “pay-to-pave” — before biologists reported that Florida’s tortoise population was dropping like the big crystal ball in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Now developers are required to relocate the tortoises (even though they were there first). The relocation business has turned into a profitable pursuit for some environmental consultants and landowners. But some developers don’t want to spend the time or money required for moving them.
Three years ago, Michigan-based Pulte Homes pleaded guilty to 22 counts of destroying gopher tortoise burrows in Marion County. Killed a couple, too. The penalty: a fine of about $13,700.
Pulte was clearing out the tortoises to build Del Webb’s Stone Creek, a gated, 55+ “active adult” community in Ocala. You better believe they made more than $13,700 on that job.
The loss of habitat isn’t the tortoises’ only problem. They’re also being slaughtered by roving coyotes. Heinrich told me he’d counted 56 tortoises killed by coyotes at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve in St. Petersburg. The preserve failed to preserve the tortoises from the predators.
“They’re kind of sitting ducks for coyotes,” Goessling agreed. He said similar attacks have occurred all over Florida and “the state’s turning a blind eye to it.”
Between the depredations and the developers, the tortoises face a dire future. There are only 150,000 left across the South, Goessling told me, with an estimated 90,000 of them in Florida.
Of those, the state is allowing developers to relocate 10,000 a year with no idea whether they will survive the trip to somewhere they’re not used to, he said.
Even The Tortoise Conservancy has sounded the alarm.
“URGENT: Developers Are Closing In — Act Now to Save Florida’s Wildlife!” their Facebook page said in November.
There is no there there
I first heard about The Tortoise Conservancy not long ago. A friend contacted me about them. He said he thought they seemed “fishy” instead of “turtley.”
When I asked why, he pointed to the involvement of a developer. While there are a few Florida developers who are concerned about the environment, they are not in the majority.
But if you’re not one of us skeptical longtime Floridians, you might not smell that fishy odor right away. The Turtle — excuse me, Tortoise — Conservancy certainly sounds good on the surface.
“Our mission as a non-profit organization is to locate, acquire, prepare and maintain suitable habitat for the relocation & preservation of Gopher Tortoises being displaced by ever increasing urban expansion and land development within their native region,” the conservancy says on its Facebook page.
Here’s where you and your wallet come in.
“By becoming a member of The Tortoise Conservancy,” their website says, “you sponsor not only an incredible gopher tortoise’s rescue, but you also support the hundreds of other animals and insects so closely reliant on their existence.”
Meanwhile, on Instagram, they say, “Your generous support helps The Tortoise Conservancy safely and humanely relocate tortoises to permanent conservation land (never to be disturbed again).” Here’s hoping they’ll tell the coyotes to get lost.
When you burrow below the surface and poke around their postings some more, you start to see that — to borrow a line from Gertrude Stein — “There is no there there.”
“Help us secure the 104 acres needed for the High Springs Wildlife Sanctuary & Tortoise Preserve,” says one Instagram post. “Every dollar gets us closer to making this sanctuary a reality.”
“We have another land owner discussing donating their 60 acres of land in Chiefland, FL to us for a new Wildlife Sanctuary & Tortoise Preserve,” the organization posted on its Facebook page in December. “We are going in January to perform a study on the land to set up a course of action to get the site ready for our stewardship.”
The conservancy’s stated objective: By 2035, acquire 10,000 acres to use as a sanctuary for the tortoises displaced by developers.
Here’s how many acres the conservancy owns now: zero.
Even if they had already acquired the 10,000 acres, Heinrich told me, “That’s not a lot of land.”
By contrast, the destination for a lot of relocated tortoises, Nokuse Plantation in Walton County, is 55,000 acres — the largest privately owned nature preserve in the southeastern U.S.
I checked with Nokuse’s director, Matthew Aresco, on whether he’d heard of The Tortoise Conservancy.
“I have not heard of The Tortoise Conservancy,” he told me. “I looked at their web site and also do not know any of their board members.”
A tortoise retirement community
Pirtle told me he’d reviewed the conservancy’s online offerings. He questioned their goals, because their expected relocation number exceeds the expected carrying capacity of the land.
“They plan on obtaining 10,000 acres by 2035 and relocating 50,000 tortoises,” he told me. That’s too many tortoises for that many acres, he said.
But he understands their goal: “If they are all mature tortoises, they can receive up to $6,000 per tortoise, which amounts to $300 million. They are misleading the public for donations.”
Records show the nonprofit company was just incorporated in June, so it hasn’t even been around for a full year yet. The IRS granted it tax exempt status in July.
Although the company’s mailing address is a post office box in Minneola, the CEO and founder is listed as Jim Stout of Winter Garden. Stout is not exactly a big name in Florida gopher tortoise circles. He’s been busy with other endeavors.
If you click on the “Meet Our Board” link on the conservancy’s website, you’ll see that Stout “has been heavily involved in commercial and residential real estate as well as conservation minded land development for over 25 years.”
If you look up “Jim Stout” and “real estate,” you find out he’s the owner of TKC Platinum Properties. On the Realtors.com website, he’s described as “a multi-state broker and residential land developer as well as specializing in site location for investors in the area of commercial and residential development.”
Pirtle pointed me to a YouTube video Stout made three years ago in which he talks about finding “raw land” on which you can build. It’s titled “How to Find Profitable Land Deals Anywhere.”
“There’s a lot of endangered species issues,” Stout says at one point in the video. “Tortoises are huge in Florida. … We paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get tortoises moved to a retirement community — heh heh! — which is essentially what they’ve done with them. We’re happy to do that, but it is expensive.”
Pirtle told me he was offended by the “retirement community” joke. Relocated tortoises aren’t retirees. They’re refugees.
Who you know versus what
I spent some time this week on the phone with Stout. To his credit, he was more open than some Florida elected officials I could name.
He took my calls, never said “no comment” and freely acknowleged that the Tortoise Conservancy currently owns no land. They’re also not licensed to relocate any tortoises.
He also said developers have had their way with Florida for a while now, and the results are anything but pretty to a Florida native.
“It’s been gut-wrenching to see everywhere I used to go is now covered with houses,” he told me. ‘There are some bad developers out there, but also some good ones.”
Some developers are willing to follow the rules on relocating tortoises, Stout said. “But the smaller builders can’t afford to do it, so they try to skirt the rules.” (Pulte is not what I’d call “small.”)
He bristled when I asked him point blank if the Tortoise Conservancy is just a front for a development scheme.
“We will strictly be a [tortoise] recipient site,” he told me. “We’re looking at this as a long-term project. We’re looking to preserve as much of Florida as we can.”
If the conservancy ever shuts down, he said, its land would be deeded over to some environmental group such as the Audubon Society or the Nature Conservancy to preserve it intact — not to develop it.
For now, he said, “we’re building a brand and building our name recognition, which is an uphill battle.” When I pointed out that he and his board seem to be unknown to top tortoise scientists, he said the scientists don’t necessarily know everything.
“We know the developers,” he said.
Our conversation was not exactly reassuring, so I remain skeptical. But Goessling, the Eckerd professor, told me he doesn’t mind if the conservancy continues with whatever the conservancy is up to.
“They’re definitely raising awareness about gopher tortoises” with their social media posts, he explained. “They’re reaching a broader audience than any of us have ever reached. If they say they’re saving tortoises, then I say more power to them.”
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