This summer’s exercises at the Marine Corps’ combat training base at Twentynine Palms, California, will proceed as scheduled, even though a plan to remove desert tortoises has been delayed.
Large Scale Exercise 2016 is slated for August, but it will not take place on any of the newly acquired land where desert tortoises live, said Capt. Justin Smith, a spokesman for Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center spokesman.
Listed as a threatened species by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Actunder federal law, the desert tortoises live on portions of the 164,000 acres that became part of the combat center in December 2013. Smith stressed that since the exercise will no longer take place on any of that land, no desert tortoises will be harmed.
The Marine Corps had planned to move more than 1,100 desert tortoises from the recently acquired land this spring, but the relocation plan still needs approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, Smith said. Neither agency is expected to sign off on the plan before it becomes too hot to move the tortoises, he said.
That means the $50 million plan to move the desert tortoises and monitor them for 30 years will have to wait until the Marine Corps gets the approvals it needs and the weather is mild enough for the tortoises, Smith said.
A desert tortoise, hatched nine years ago at the combat center’s Tortoise Research and Captive Rearing Site, is released into the wild in September, next to a burrow biologists dug for her. A radio transmitter is attached to her shell for tracking.
Photo Credit: Kelly O’Sullivan/Marine Corps
A conservation group has recently announced that it intends to file a lawsuit to block the planned relocation of the desert tortoises.
Past attempts to relocate tortoises have shown that the animals try to go back to their old homes, putting them at risk of being eaten by predators, said Ileene Anderson, of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The pending lawsuit has not affected the timeline for approving the tortoise relocation plan, said Jane Hendron, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“We are still reviewing the current translocation plan, which must be done before we can complete the revised Biological Opinion,” Hendron said in an email to Marine Corps Times. “We already notified the Marine Corps that we would not be able to complete these tasks in time to meet the spring translocation window.”
