S1E21: The Desert Tortoise Still Has a Chance

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

[Alicia]
This podcast was made possible by the generous support of our Patreon patrons. They provide us with the resources we need to produce each episode. You can join them at nine 0 mile from Needles.com slash patreon.

[Bouse Parker]
The sun is a giant blowtorch aimed at your face. There ain't no shade nowhere. Let's hope you brought enough water. It's time for 90 Miles From Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast, with your hosts, Chris Clarke and Alicia Pike.

[Chris]
Hey there. Welcome to 90 miles from Needles. This is Chris. Alicia's on assignment. We're going to be talking about one of the desert's most amiable and most popular denizens, the desert tortoise, an ancient species that is superbly well adapted to the deserts of the Southwest and that really wants to coexist with humans. If only we would let it going to be talking to a couple of good friends of mine who work on tortoise issues. But first, let's roll the clock back to 2010. It's the Obama administration, and there's a bit of controversy over the desert tortoise, and the role seems to be playing in slowing down the implementation of desert solar. Solar projects in a desert take up a lot of room, and for various engineering reasons, developers tend to want to put solar in places that desert tortoises within. It's becoming an issue in 2010 to the point where Vice President Joe Biden decrees that an interagency website collecting science on desert tortoises should be abolished and possibly one of the first big conservation related gaps of his career. If you want more details on that, google biden and desert tortoise gov. In the meantime, the US. Fish and Wildlife Service puts out a video talking about overall threats to the tortoise, and it does mention solar, but it points out a whole lot more threats. The approach in the styling may be a little bit dated, a little bit folksy, and the intent may well have been to point out that there were a whole lot of things that were bigger threats to tortoises than solar, which is debatable. But despite likely ulterior motives on the part of the funders, the video remains a pretty good source of information. We're going to excerpt from it throughout this episode, and we will link to it in the show notes starting now. Here's the intro to the Heat is on desert Tortoises and survival by the US. Fish and Wildlife Service.

[Narrator]
Hello, newborn desert tortoise. Welcome to your world. Look around, break out of your shell and explore what lies ahead.

[Chris]
Okay, I'm not going to do this throughout the entire episode, but I feel like I should clarify that the video shows at this point a tortoise hatching. Encouraging tortoises to break out of their shells is not something we generally do outside of that particular context. That annoying Nitpick aside, let's get back to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

[Narrator]
Break out of your shell and explore what lies ahead. Stretch your legs. Feel the desert soil. One thing for sure, though it won't be easy. Desert tortoises have lived across the Southwest landscape for thousands of years. Their adaptation to its extreme harsh environment is amazing surviving ground temperatures greater than 130 degrees Fahrenheit and able to live a year or even two without water. But now the desert tortoise is in danger of extinction. In the 1920s, there were hundreds of desert tortoises per square mile in parts of the Mojave Desert. Now, in those same areas, there may be fewer than a dozen per square mile.

[Tim S.]
My name is Tim Shields. I have spent my entire career as a biologist in the Mojave Desert. The first 35 years of it were studying desert tortoises and basically documenting their decline in excruciating detail. A passive observer of a catastrophe. And then about ten years ago, I shifted gears and started actively working on tortoise conservation, trying to intervene to forestall the catastrophe and change the trajectory.

[Luke B.]
I'm Lucas Basulto. I am a desert native. I was born and raised in Barstow, California, and I love tortoises. I love them enough that a couple of years ago I started a small startup organization called Saving Slowpoke in which we try and get people informed as much as we can about the state of the tortoise in the wild and help them along with any questions they have about their captive care and their captive situation as well. And it's all just because we love the tortoises so much. And that's a family venture that we undertook just because family is how we got into it and family is how we're going to help the tortoise, I think.

[Chris]
Thanks, both of you for joining us on 90 miles from Needles, and I should say full disclosure Luke and I work together in our day jobs with the California Desert Program at the National Parks Conservation Association. Just so that people don't suspect me of slipping a ringer into the podcast here, we'll own it. So the tortoise was listed as a threatened species in 1990, and presumably that has fixed everything. And the tortoises are doing just fine.

[Tim S.]
Everything's wonderful. Yeah. There's some shortcomings to the approach we take to endangered species conservation, and I will say that the attention that garnered has been good for tortoise conservation. And I think the track toward extinction has been slowed by the designation. I've got lots of criticisms about how we do it, but it's better than it would have been had we ignored it entirely.

[Chris]
What is happening with a tortoise right now?

[Narrator]
Over 30 years ago, USGS. Researcher Kristin Berry set of 27 study plots in the Mojave and adjoining Colorado deserts. These plots were designed to help understand how tortoise populations and their habitats might be changing over time.

[Tim S.]
Dr. Kristin Barry, the godmother of tortoise conservation, set up a program for long term monitoring of tortoise populations. And I was lucky enough to stumble into it right at its inception. And I became one of the field workers that went out every spring and spent 60 days on a single square mile of desert. There were repeated coverages of these plots. There were 27 of them originally, whittled it down to 16, and every four years, each of those plots would get visited. And we'd do the same population estimation coverage so that we had this longterm sense of the trajectory on each of those places. But also we studied in detail. We would come on a dead tortoise and we'd say, what killed this tortoise? And very early in my career, I started encountering juvenile tortoises that were killed by ravens. And so raven predation has been a growing threat over time, but the biggest drop came in the late 80s when a respiratory disease showed up. We've just been through a pandemic. This was a tortoise pandemic, very similar to COVID And the deaths that those tortoises suffered was very similar to COVID Basically, they drowned. They shed fluid into their respiratory system and they would drown. And it was highly transmissible and it spread across the desert. We saw declines of 50% every four years. That was the massive shock. And now they're facing these multiple threats. I would put ravens as the most serious, but coyotes as well. Habitat degradation, you throw that in there and people always want a ranked order list, and we don't know enough to say, oh, habitat degradation is by far the most serious one. Or invasive plants displacing native food species. That's number four on the list. It's not like that. But the way I look at it is, identify the existential threats and there's a bunch of them. And to me, the problem of raven predation was the most manageable of the likely existential threat. So that's what I've been spending my time on, is, how do we address that one? I know we can manage the raven threat, and I raised my hand to do that one, and that's what I'm doing right now.

[Luke B.]
And not to vilify the raven too much, but that's one of those examples of people not knowing the repercussions of their actions, which in the raven's case could be litter just overabundance of trash, uncovered trash cans, just kind of making the raven population boom and grow, and having that natural process of a raven preying on a small tortoise even more.

[Tim S.]
It's what ravens do. Right, but we have made many more ravens than there used to be.

[Chris]
I don't have as many Mojave years under my belt as Tim does, but I do remember being in the Mojave at a time when if you saw a raven, there were generally like one Or two of them at a time. But that seems to be the exception to the rule these days.

[Tim S.]
Absolutely.

[Chris]
Seeing a mated pair of ravens and No other ravens, and

[Tim S.] Kristin Barry. This killed us when she came up with it. It was brilliant. Kristin is this amazingly prescient conservation biologist, and she might have been or something. She made us write down we had a form. Every time we saw a raven, we had to write down that we had seen this raven. We had to tell what it was doing, what direction it was flying, GPS location. But down the line, I was like, oh, my God, this is just going to be such a pain in the butt. But it gave us the numbers and the rise in ravens. And at that point, ravens were well into their boom, but it gave us the numbers, and we can look back and see the growth in raven numbers on those particular plots. But it's just the eye test has been it's remarkable how many more ravens there are now.

[Chris]
Curious, Luke, whether the experience that you have, both just as a person living in the desert and the jobs you've had doing land management and assessment of biological diversity on parcels, things like that, whether that jibs with your observations about tortoises.

[Luke B.]
It does, yeah. Ravens are very clearly a huge problem. When I worked for the Mohave national preserve under their biologists there, my job was to survey power lines and just look for signs of raven predation, just so we can see if those ravens were the ones that were taking the tortoises. One of the most grim jobs I've had, but, yeah, just seeing how prevalent it actually is really puts it into perspective. And, yeah, when you find five or six baby like hatchling tortoise shells underneath a power line, you look up and you see the raven up there just squawking at its babies, and it's a tough one to see.

[Chris]
In another section of the heat is on. Longtime tortoise biologist Larry La Pre finds tortoise shells under power lines.

[Larry La Pre]
The easiest place to find raven nests is underneath power towers. Here's a tortoise that's been eaten by a raven. It's a characteristic that they'll peck a hole in the top to kill it. In northern forests such as Maine, ravens are still a wilderness bird. In the Mojave desert, which has had urban sprawl and so many human modifications, ravens have increased up to one 0% in the last 50 years, and the availability of food has just caused this huge population increase. They're social birds and they congregate around landfills, around sewage ponds, around fast food restaurants, cattle yards, horse properties, anywhere where there's easy food. But the ones that have learned to eat juvenile tortoises, they can decimate a generation of tortoises right around the nest.

[Tim S.]
I think one of the interesting things about the tortoise, and the reason I think people pay so much attention to it, is that in the post world war II phase, there were still millions of tortoises in the desert, and hundreds of thousands of those got hauled off to Los Angeles and Las Vegas and Phoenix. And a couple of generations of human beings grew up around tortoises. They were captive tortoises, but they were doing tortoise things, and tortoises are just inherently charming animals. So I think the entire ecoregion that contains the Mojave desert, the human beings there, were charmed by tortoises on a massive scale, such that when threats arose for the tortoise, there was a built in constituency, a really powerful conservation constituency that was accidental. It was a byproduct of the fact that so many tortoises got hauled off to live in backyards in La.

[Luke B.]
My dad's story about how the tortoise affected our family in a similar way that Tim just described, rather than him meeting a tortoise in Los Angeles where it was taken out of the wild, he was the transplant. He met it out in the desert. Yeah. That moment for him, I think, was what made him fall in love with the desert. When it was through that that he conveyed, he taught us that same love for the desert and that appreciation for the desert through the tortoise. My dad worked out at Fort Irwin, which is a military base out north of Barstow, and he worked live fire range for many years. And as the story goes, day was winding down. He was waiting for some targets to be set up before he ended his day. And he was laying under his truck just to get out of the sun and the heat, and he said that he heard this little crunching walking up on him and look to his left, and there was a desert tortoise trying to get under the car for the same shade. And he said that was the first tortoise he had seen. And then that was that moment that really showed him that there was a really cool life in the desert. And that sparked the whole passion and love for the desert. And, yeah, that's what he taught us, taught our whole family, was to love it and to appreciate it,

[Chris]
swerving into.What people can do about the plate that the tortoise finds itself in. And I got to say, having done this kind of work for the last 40 years or so, I get really tired of the word plate. I would love for everything to not have a plate anymore but jumping right into it. What is hardshell Labs?

[Tim S.]
Hardshell labs is a company I founded dedicated to applying emerging technology to the clash between humans, ravens, and tortoises. And that clash is mediated by a lot of human behavior. There was a moment I was working with this volunteer named Freya radar on this plot, and we had spent weeks on this plot and hadn't seen a baby tortoise, hadn't seen a juvenile tortoise. And I'm pretty good at finding juvenile tortoises, and I didn't find any and I didn't find any burrows. And finally one day she came up to me, she said, I finally saw a baby tortoise. And I brightened up, and she said it was in the beak of a raven. And she saw the legs windmilling, and that was the moment that broke me, it's just I got to do something. So I went on a search, and it's just like I started with aerial drones. What's the potential for aerial drones to scare ravens? Serendipitously I ran across a guy who was using lasers to steer flocks of geese, and it turned out the lasers were extremely effective in redistributing ravens and scaring them away from places. And of late, we've been really into 3D printed fake baby tortoises, and both to measure the intensity of raven predation pressure. And now we're in the second year of the weaponized techno tortoise, which is the first tortoise that's ever counter attacked against a raven. Ravens come in, they peck at them. There's some complex electronics that basically sense when the model is being jarred at a certain intensity. We have a spray system that sprays a nontoxic but very irritating material in the face of the raven. And this is it's called aversive training. We're trying to get ravens, trying to train them to avoid juvenile tortoises. So we're just throwing everything we can at the problem and finding all these tools. And now we're at the state like, we're now working on Internet connection to remotely operated devices. So the potential to have a laser out in the world and to be able to operate it from a laptop, and that is a way we have to be efficient about this. How can a single human consciousness have as broad an effect as possible? And one way would be a single operator monitors 20 sites. And another thing we're attacking, and I will say we're attacking this problem, is the subsidy sites that are generating this huge increase in raven populations. We're now working with Fish and Wildlife Service and other interested entities in denying Raven's access to these subsidies. And I'm about to go into the second year of a project at a sewage treatment plant and an organic composting facility in Victorville, and we're applying lasers to drive ravens away from these sites. And we're having spectacular success at that.

[Chris]
About six or seven years ago, I met you out at a composting facility.

[Tim S.]
In the very one more picture.

[Chris]
Hill same one. For those of you who are interested, we will leave the link in the show notes to the story I wrote for KCET about that day in which.

[Tim S.]
That was a funny story, too. Everybody should look it up. It's a very amusing story.

[Chris]
I'll just spoil it a little bit by saying I arranged behind Tim's back to have myself shot with a laser.

[Tim S.]
Guest so that I could he was a very naughty boy.

[Chris]
I could testify that it wasn't actually Hurting the ravens, because I knew somebody was going to ask, yeah, so how has that work gone?

[Tim S.]
Oh, incredible. We just continued with it. So that was handheld green laser that required a single operator basically firing a riflelike configuration of a laser, and that's very labor intensive. So I recognize, like, that was at the phase of we were asking the question, can a laser be used to drive birds away from here? And that was we were spectacularly successful with that. But there were two of us in a bunker and we had about 95% or more reduction in four days. Like, they don't habituate to the laser. They hated it. They went away temporarily. But I recognized this is okay, but it's really labor and capital intensive. So how do we affect efficiencies here? So that made me think if we could distribute the consciousness of a single operator across this area, we could then greatly amplify the effect and make the whole thing much more efficient. And so we're on the cusp of that now. We got some National Science Foundation funding to forge that link between a computer and a remote device, which is going to supply that efficiency. We're also doing a lot of studying right now of different laser formula. So color, flash, pattern, intensity, all of these variables. We're playing with those to find species specific formulas for laser based avian repulsion and hardshell labs is also embedded in the capitalist system. And we have to find commercially viable services to sell. And luckily, they parallel the conservation applications very well. So we're working with agricultural interests and airports have bad bird problems, and sewage treatment plants want to get rid of them, and utilities really don't want them nesting on their poles and towers where we can scratch those backs and fund the conservation work. And so that's where we are now is we're getting these really refined versions of you saw a very primitive version of laser based propulsion, and now we're about to go big time with it because we've figured out ways to do it inexpensively. And in the capitalist system, if you can do it cheaply, you'll win. And you know, I'm a capitalism skeptic, but we had to schedule this interview.

[Chris]
For a time when our anti capitalist cohost was not available.

[Tim S.]
I know, it's a bummer.

[Luke B.]
Miss you, Alicia.

[Tim S.]
Yes. Anyway, here we are.

[Luke B.]
Since we're cursing so much yes,.

[Chris]
she  Would have felt kinship. So you mentioned the work with lasers and the work with the 3D printed tortoises. You mentioned scaring ravens with drones. I know that there was some discussion about oiling eggs like that deep into.

[Tim S.]
That, and I'm very proud of that too, because that has become a standard management technique not just towards conservation, but also for sage grouse conservation. And that involves this is like the science fiction portion is we've got drones that can fly up to a nest. The operator is looking through a camera, and there's an oil spraying system that sends an extremely accurate stream of oil onto the eggs. And I work with these professional videographer drone pilots. And they are astoundingly good at hitting the eggs from we've hit them up to 10 meters away downwind firing. Down wind. Just astounding accuracy but what this does is it allows us. If we get a thin layer of oil on the surface of the eggs. The eggs are not viable. It interferes with respiration. The embryo dies. But because they're physically undamaged. The adults continue taking care of those eggs for a period of time. The goal is to get them beyond the point at which they can renest. And we refined this. We worked really intensively with Southern Cal, Edison and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. I found incredibly good people within those organizations who gave us a shot at this. They could have just given us the bum's rush and we showed up. We said, we want to do this for tortoise conservation. We had to work a long time to get them to allow us to fly drone up anywhere near their infrastructure. But we proved we could do it safely, and now it's like we do it every year and we've oil thousands of Raven eggs. And I'm very proud of it. Not just because of its effect, but by showing that you can go after something like this, and if you're patient enough and persistent enough at it, you can refine it and you can work with people. I really think this is what we have to do. Who might I share an interest in promoting this with? Who can I work with? Who do I have to reassure? As an example, we went to every animal rights organization we could think of.

[Chris]
I was going to ask

[Tim S.]
To get ahead of this. And we said to them, this is what we're planning, this is what it does, this is why we're doing it. And it was remarkable. Didn't have a single one object to it because we went to them preemptively, rather than having them hear about it after the fact and have their imaginations working, we went to them ahead of this, way ahead of getting into it. We knew we had a promising technique, but we went preemptively to them. And this is Mercy Vaughn, my longtime partner at Sundance Biology, brilliant person at interacting with human beings. And she said, we got to go and talk to these people before we get this going. We got to figure out, are they going to object? And if they do, how can we work with them? And it turned out every organization admitted that the rise in Raven numbers was an ecological catastrophe, had to be dealt with. Some of them said, we can't voice support for this, but we won't oppose. It been noncontroversial.

[Chris]
And there have been raven control programs that animal rights groups have fought.

[Tim S.]
there Are proposals for massive poisoning, and those have been opposed and stopped repeatedly. And so the sociological framework is another factor you have to consider anytime you come up with a brilliant idea. There may be people that don't really like your brilliant idea. It's just kind of a dance with everybody that's involved, and you just have to be pragmatic about it and realistic, but I'm super proud of I'll tell you, ten years ago, I was like, how can I do anything about this? And now, ten years after the fact, we're doing stuff. We got some stuff happening. I've got hilarious videos of ravens attacking these fake tortoises and getting a snoot full of fake grape juice, artificial grape flavoring in their face, which, strangely enough, it's pepper spray for birds. So I could not possibly have mapped out this path. And I got to say, I'm so happy that Luke is if he's not on the same path, he said this is a parallel path. He's a young guy, and we need people like him in the movement because I'm an old guy and I'm going to be pushing up creosote bushes here and not too long in the future, we've got to pass it on to a new generation. And I'll just say this, the next step we're going to do is we're going to turn a lot of these activities into online games, and we're going to recruit a massive number of young people who would not otherwise ever have anything to do with conservation.

[Bouse Parker]
Coming up next, saving slowpoke on the job, helping tortoises win. Friends in Barstow also, do solar projects help tortoises by giving them shade? What the hell do you think?

[Petey]
Hello. Hello. I'm Petey Mesquitey, host of growing native from Kxci, Tucson. Each week since 1992, I've been sharing stories, poems, and songs about flora, fauna, family, and the glory of living in the borderlands of southern Arizona. Recent episodes of Growing Native are available@kxci.org apple podcast and PRX. The desert is beautiful, my friends. Yeah, it is.

[Bouse Parker]
Desert news for November 7, 2022.

[Chris]
Well, that stretch of land between Pahrump, Nevada and Las Vegas that we visited in our episode on the Yellow Pine solar project is not getting any breaks whatsoever. In addition to Rough Hat Clark County Solar, which we talked about in the news last episode, EDF Renewables also wants to develop the Potosi Solar project, which would be a 1 GW solar photovoltaic project and occupy 9680 and a half acres of public land. This would be essentially a replacement of upland mojave habitat that is currently home to desert tortoises, badgers, coyotes, bobcats, any number of interesting reptiles, joshua trees, ancient mojave, yuccas, ancient ephedra. This is all part of the land rush that stems from the proposal of Greenlink West, which is a major transmission line that would run from Reno to Las Vegas. More or less the intention of that transmission line being to siphon sunlight turned into electricity to the factories of Reno and not coincidentally, to encourage building of factories in Reno. We'll be getting out there in the early in the year to report on Rough Hat solar and potassium and progress on Yellow Pine and hopefully to get a little bit more time with Shannon Salter. For more information, you can follow Basin and range watch on Twitter. If you're still doing Twitter in the Soon to happen Post Elon Musk era, they can be reached at basin range at basin range or check out their website@basinandrangewatch.org. You'll also notice on Basin and Range Watches Twitter feed notifications that the Gene Lake Solar project would occupy 4500 acres in the Mojave Desert in the Hidden Valley, which is just south of Las Vegas on the foot of the McCullough range, not far from Mojave National Preserve and the proposed Avi kwa ame National Monument. Undisturbed excellent desert tortoise habitat. It's an absolute treasure of a valley. We got to do something about Nevada, folks. The environmentalists in Nevada need our help.

Meanwhile, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey continues to violate federal law by ordering the stacking of shipping containers along the border to function as an impromptu and entirely penetrable border wall. In October, Ducey said in a news release, the lack of planning and action from the Biden administration demonstrates that border states like Arizona cannot rely on the federal government to ensure its security. Arizona is taking action to protest on behalf of our citizens. Arizona is going to do the job that Joe Biden refuses to do secure the border in any way we can. Ducey ordered the installation of more than 100 double staffed containers along the wall near Yuma over the summer, prompting a letter from the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees dams and waterworks, which called for the existing containers to be removed and no new ones placed. Despite Ducey's claim that he is hardening the border against unwanted crossings, a local tribe, the Cocopa along the Colorado River, has also asked the state to remove the shipping containers. Tribal officials say that they have been working with federal, state and local law enforcement to secure the border, including approving, ground mounted cameras and Normandy style barriers, which are mainly useful for preventing vehicle traffic. The tribe complains that the state has placed 42 double stacked containers on its land and that containers placed outside the reservation has funneled traffic through the reservation. According to the center for Biological Diversity, the shipping containers obstruct a critical Jaguar and Ocelot migration corridor and even a cursory glance at news photos of the wall shows. If you know anything about shipping containers and the ease with which they are cut, modified, knocked over, etc. This ain't nothing but political show. Don't even have to have people opposed to the wall knocking on the containers for the container wall to fail. The first good strong wind or a boob or flash flood is going to knock these things down. Until then, anybody with a portable cutting torch will be able to carve doors to residents of Elka, Nevada were sentenced early in November for desecrating a sacred Native American site in Basin and Range National Monument with graffiti. Jonathan Pavan and Daniel Plata, both of Elko, pleaded guilty to conspiring to paint graffiti at White River Narrows, including an approximately 20 foot long image on. A rock face that contains petroglyphs. According to the US. Attorney's Office for the District of Nevada, pavan pleaded guilty in June to misdemeanor, conspiracy and a felony violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. He was sentenced to six months for the misdemeanor and a year plus one day for the felony. Those sentences will be served concurrently. Plata pleaded guilty in July to misdemeanor damage of archaeological resources and he was sentenced to four months in prison followed by eight months of home confinement. In a previous episode, we talked to Shoshone resident Susan Sorrels and the Amargosa conservancy's Mason Voehl about the Shoshone pupfish, a remarkable small fish that survives in one of the driest parts of the American deserts. The Shoshone pupfish's cousin, the Devil's hole pupfish, is confined to a single deep limestone cave in the Mojave Desert in Nevada in an outlying section of Death Valley National Park. This year, 263 of them highest count in some years live in water that stays around 93 or 94 degrees Fahrenheit in a really remarkably small place a spring that significantly smaller than an Olympic sized swimming pool, the smallest habitat of any known vertebrate. In a paper published just this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, UC Berkeley, biologists report that the first complete genome sequences of eight pupfish species 30 individuals in all, including a Devils Hole pupfish, have been sequenced and the Devils hole pupfish is so inbred that more than half of the genomes of those eight individuals are identical. Lead researcher Christopher Martin, UC Berkeley's, associate professor of Integrative biology and curator of Ichthyology in the campus's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, said high levels of inbreeding are associated with a higher risk of extinction. And the inbreeding in the Devils hole pupfish is equal to or more severe than levels reported so far in other isolated natural populations, such as the Isle Royal Wolves in Michigan, mountain gorillas in Africa and Indian tigers. Martin did not compare the pup fish and their genomes to the British oil family that we know of. Martin continued Although we were not able to directly measure fitness, the increased inbreeding in these pupfish likely results in a substantial reduction in fitness. The Devils hole pupfish species is currently doing okay in the wild and in captive population, but this low genetic diversity could spell trouble as the climate changes and human impacts become greater. In podcast News as we mentioned in the last episode, we will not be releasing new episodes in December. We'll be coming back to you in January. We'll be spending the month of December resting, recuperating, planning for 2023, and we might just publish an episode during the month of December that comes from another podcast or two that we like still deciding on that. We are hoping that next year will prove to be very productive for us, getting some excellent reporting out, bringing stories of desert protection campaigns from across the Southwest to you, featuring wonderful desert organisms and desert communities. And as the year comes to a close, we know that you are going to be beset by requests for money from all the good causes you've ever heard of and more. And who are we not to join the trend? We've been very gratified at the level of support that we've gotten from our listeners in the last few months. And for the last six months or so, our Patreon subscribership has plateaued. We're not losing subscribers on the net basis, but we have been sitting at around 75 subscribers for quite some time. This is enough to keep us going in emergency lean team mode. But we'd really like to be able to hire people to do produced stories, and we're not going to be able to do that at current levels of support. 75 supporters is really gratifying, don't get me wrong. And we love you, those of you who have been pitching in through Patreon or Kofi, you make it possible for us to do what we're doing. But I'd like to set a goal. Let's make it by the end of this year. We'd like to get to 100 Patreon subscribers by the end of this year. That's just 25 more than we have right now. Think about it. If you've been thinking about joining us, $5 or more. We'll take 5-5-A month. Really helps if we could just get 25 more people to support us at $5 a month, that's a significant increase in our budget. Our budget is that low and it'll make us feel good and make us feel like what we're doing means something to people. So if you've been thinking about it, why not join us? Why not go to Nine Zeromilesfromnedles.com Patreon? Or if you don't like patreon nine zeromiles from needles.com. Kofi. At that second link, you can make a one time donation. It's very easy. If you like what we've done so far this year and you want to see more of it next year, please consider it. We'll be very grateful.

[Bouse Parker]
You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert protection podcast. Speeding through desert wildlife habitat is dangerous. Drive like a tortoise.

[Narrator]
Hey, baby tortoise, you're beginning an amazing life. The desert tortoise is the largest reptile in the Mojave Desert. Their lifespan is a bit like humans. Young are soft shelled and vulnerable. Sexual maturity arrives around age 15. Males and females court, and the female digs a nest with four to eight eggs, each about the size of a ping pong ball. The shell, called a carapace, has two layers bone underneath and on top, scoots made of keratin like fingernails. Desert tortoises spend 90% of their time in underground burrows, which can be shallow for as long as 30ft there. They hibernate in winter and stay cool in summer when the burrow temperature may be 40 degrees cooler than the searing heat above.

[Chris]
Actually, the episode that we're getting ready to publish tomorrow, there's a brief news item in which I actually took out a reference to a study because I just used too many curse words in describing the study, which appeared in a photovoltaic trade journal. The writer referenced a study that came out fairly recently, I think, in which UNLV researchers studied how well tortoises did in a highly modified, small, like, 20 megawatt photovoltaic facility where there were special tortoise entry spots in the fence and they kept some of the native vegetation. And the idea was that the tortoises really benefited from the shade that the solar panels provided, which is something part of the reason that I reacted so strongly to this, aside from it being really obvious corporate bullshit, was that at one point I was involved in this relationship. And my girlfriend at the time had a friend in Los Angeles that didn't like me at all, and he would always pull the line about just to irritate me about tortoises need shade. You're depriving tortoises of shade. And he knew it was bullshit, and he knew it was deliberately annoying enough that it would annoy me. And here is this publication putting it out.

[Tim S.]
Out as, well, we can go ahead and do this because, gosh, the tortoises are doing great. When we totally wipe out the environment, I wouldn't doubt I mean, tortoises will explore, and I don't doubt that they would take advantage of going in there, but you have to look at the I can do a string of curse words, too, but I've had tortoises walk up to be in my shade and your dad encountering that one that wanted to get in the shade. Yes, they'll get in the best shade they can and Opportunists, but they also dig Burroughs. And boroughs are really shady. Being out, it's 95, 98, something like that. And I would put my hand down inside a borough. Back in the old days, we actually see come out with our hands. That's like a long time ago. But the feeling of just like, it's cool and moist in there. That's a really nice place to hang out. They don't need solar panels for shade. No, that's BS. The idea that we are benefiting them by making the desert shadier is insane.

[Luke B.]
One other thing is the take of tortoises. That's been something that I've encountered over my years as, like, a field person was just coming across people who are still taking tortoises and still see them as a pet that they want to have and that they came across and, oh, it's not running for me. It's checking me out. Maybe it wants to be my pet. I think the going mindset we have when we encounter an animal, it doesn't actively run away from us, and we've come across people who either want to take them for pets or want to take them for food. And that's another issue. I think. That not many people realize. Is that there is a really horrible market out there for tortoise parts. And that's something that still happens even with some tortoises that I know here in the Morongo Basin. There's been tortoises that I've been visiting for two or three years and over the boroughs are I go and check on them just to see how they're doing. See if they're getting food and food growing in that area and just getting an idea what's going on in the habits out there. And yet it's just in the past, like a year or two, with the amount of people that the area has seen and the growth of the population here, you can't help but think there's someone walking along this trail next to his borough and coming across him and seeing him as a pet and taking them, and that's that.

[Chris]
So you said you've actually encountered people who are thinking about lifting the tortoises. What do you say?

[Luke B.]
Yeah, I've been adjacent to that situation in my time working for a federal land agency of some kind. I spent a lot of time on the desert, and when you come across them, they have these big kind of metal rods, I guess it would be, and they're just jabbing them into the base of the crease, though. And at first, you can't tell what they're actually doing until you cruise up on them and you check out what they're doing, that there's a turrets borough there. You ask them, and they're trying to say, oh, there's food, or we're trying to get this thing out of the hole. And all you can do because I don't think there's any kind of mal intent there. It's either a cultural thing, and you can't fault people for anything like that to a certain extent. All I can do is try and explain to them why it's not the thing to do. And that's usually what would happen, is try and say, like, you can't do that. That's protected, and you try to communicate that as best as you can. But, yeah, there's been times that I've heard of that they come up on that same situation. They opened the back of the van, and there's a few dozen tortoises back there, or they come up on a bush or something that they did actually get the tortoise out, and it's a massacre. They can cut the tortoise in half, blow out the parts they need, and leave the carcass there. They don't need all of the tortoise. That's another real sad thing that happens to the tortoises.

[Chris]
In a way, the threats from individual human beings seem more immediate because you can definitely identify with finding yourself in that position of confronting somebody, but also you can communicate really directly with the people doing it, and you have a way better chance of changing their behavior than you would with, say, a coyote or a raven.

[Tim S.]
You have the tools to address the threat because the threat is really the ignorance, largely. I don't think a lot of people bear ill will to the tortoise, but they will, unconsciously or through ignorance, engage in a behavior that's detrimental to the tortoise. But people I don't think anyone wants to wipe tortoises out. The fact that they're getting wiped out is an indictment of the way we're operating on the planet. But Luke is talking about that. You can address that threat. You understand it. You understand the motivation. I look at something like invasive plants. They're absolutely silent, and yet I've gone to plots with almost nothing but bromas on it or cheat grass and found ancient tortoise carcasses. And I look around and it's now a monoculture of an invasive grass. And that is an ecological catastrophe, but it's silent and gradual. Raven predation is relatively dramatic because you can tell it. Here are the picked carcasses of the juvenile tortoises. You can look up at the bird, like Luke was saying. You look up, they're at their nest. This is obviously the stuff that falls from their nest. The tortoise garcasses, that's fairly direct. And then there's this whole bunch. Like, habitat degradation is really hard to quantify, and its effect on tortoises is insidious, but very gradual.

[Chris]
I was in Death Valley earlier this year before the roads all washed out and at the south end of the paved road where the bad water road crews off to go over to Shonee and the valley keeps going to the south, there was just this stretch of miles and miles of the valley where almost all the creosote had died. And Chris Hope can tolerate drought. Yes, but the only creosotes that were still surviving along the north end of the hairy Wade road for the first 5 miles or so heading south, where those that lived in, like, the bottom of a drainage or on the north facing side of a slope where they weren't getting quite as much direct sun, all the other creosote was dead. And if you figure if the creosote is dead, then the plants that the tortoises like to eat are not having that good luck either. And the parallel that comes to mind is if you have a whole group of people that have terminal cancer and you're struggling to try and figure out how to address that, and then the ravens are like the equivalent of speeding traffic in front of a hospital. You probably still want to get a crosswalk in there.

[Luke B.]
Yeah. Habitat and food sources, I think, tie into something that's actually really cool about tortoises. Habitat degradation and climate change affect it because of how cool an animal it actually is. This is a large reptile that has evolved to adapt in a place that's very resource deficient. This tortoise comes out and feeds maybe for two or three months out of the year. If it's a good spring, that's where it gets probably the bulk of its nutrients. And then in the summer, all that stuff dries up. So they get a little more nutrients, but they don't get that water. They don't get the fresh, new little forbs that are popping up. They have a very narrow window when they can actually eat and when they can drink, just because those things are so fleeting here in the Mojave. And when you bring climate change into the equation, those windows get smaller and smaller. And, yeah, it affects the tortoises in that way, too, but they're just so specially adapted and so cool and animal.

[Tim S.]
One thing I'm obsessed with is tortoises drinking water. And I've seen seven distinct behaviors, seven distinct ways that they get water into their body. And when a rainstorm comes, they don't miss a trick. They're on it. And they're so tuned, they know before the storm shows up. Like, they'll move to places where water is going to puddle in advance of storms. And spending time with an animal that's so tuned to its environment and takes advantage of every opportunity. And like Luke says, the opportunities are scarce as a damn hard place to make a living. And then you come up on this 1215 pound animal that has built itself entirely on resources that are immediately around it. They don't get bananas from Ecuador. It's just like they're eating what's available and they're drinking what's immediately around them, and they're just they're remarkably good at it.

[Luke B.]
All that being said, handing this off to the next generation, I think one of the things I would say on the topic of what can you do to protect to help protect the Torres of help do your part is just to educate yourself. If you're a young person out there, a young person of color especially, really get into it, find something that you can latch onto and study it. That doesn't have to be the tortoise. It could be anything. It could be whatever catches your eye. But the point there is to take the time and learn about it. And like I said before, that's sort of how you develop a love that's probably one of the most important things, is just that young people out there find ways to take the initiative to teach themselves. We can't always rely on others teaching us. So a lot of the times, you gotta take it upon yourself to learn the stuff, too.

[Narrator]
Humans collectively have had a big negative impact on desert tortoise habitat, but people individually can make a big positive difference, too.

[Chris]
It seems like a pretty good segue into talking about saving slowpoke for a few minutes. What's going on with that organization?

[Luke B.]
We just started? We're only a couple of years old. We're not a non profit or anything like that. Right now, we're working on that. But really, we wanted to start it just because the community that I grew up at, Barstow, as growing up, there wasn't very many kids like me that I could, like, talk to about reptiles and, like, the tortoise and the desert. Nobody really cared at the time. I always made fun of it for it, I think. But Saving Slope Up is torn out of this need that we kind of identified as, like, something that should be happening along with the lines of what you were saying. Tim, is just empowering the next generation to sort of get into it. And that's really what we want to do with this organization, is reach out to underrepresented communities like Barstow. Growing up, we didn't have people very often come in and talking to us about how pool the desert was. Growing up in Barstow, you hear how much sucks in the desert, how much Barstow sucks. There's just all these negatives about the desert. And I was lucky to have mentors that showed me, might have showed me that it was a special place and a very unique place, and that helped me build an appreciation for it. And that's all we're trying to do with Saving Slope. We want to get out there and talk to people. We want to share our passion, really show people how passionate we are about it and hope that is inspiring to some people that look like us. Like I said, this is a family organization where we're all people of color. And that, I think, ties into the messaging we're talking about is just trying to get more people who look like me into this field and excited about a desert conservation, tortoise conservation. And, yeah, we're doing that at Saving Slope through the lens of the tortoise. We're using the tortoise as initial step into protecting and helping the desert. So the plan is really we want to begin with communities like Barcelo, obviously branching out into other smaller communities in the high desert, probably first. And, yeah, just talking to people, showing them tortoises. You put a captive tortoise in front of somebody, and suddenly they're lost in it. To see that connection is really what we've worked for, and that's what it is.

[Chris]
And who is slowpoke?

[Luke B.]
Yes. Slow poke is our mascot. She is an adolescent tortoise. She's probably 15 years old or so. She's just reaching the size that they would start reproducing. But she has three legs, so she's a little bit slower than most. We chose SloFo for our mascot because of the three legs and because she's a little bit slower than most. And that her. The way she looks speaks to our stance on captive care and the importance of making sure you have the right resources and the right environment set aside for this animal before you get it. A Slowpoke story goes like she was more than likely taken out of the desert. She wasn't a registered tortoise, and we got her. When someone who's unprepared takes a tortoise out of the desert and the tortoise does what it does and digs a burrow into their house, that's what happened with Slowpoke. She was taken out of the desert. She dug a borough and the family that had her moved away while she was in Hibernation. So they didn't want to spend the time digging around of her burrow into their house. They said, it's the next person's problem. But the next person that moved in had a dog that like to chew on stuff. And when Slow folk came out in the spring, they were surprised. They said, oh, something came out of that hole. Now our dogs chewing on it. So it speaks to making sure that you're prepared when you're taking on an animal that has very specific care requirements. And that's the other half of saving Slowpoke is just really pushing the importance of conservation of wild populations and making people aware of those things and hoping that they want to take a part in it. But the other half is making sure that we're doing our part for the tortoises that are in captivity, that have to remain in captivity for likely the next 50, 60 years of their lives. There's such a large population of captive tortoises that like, nine times out of ten, I would say, are being neglected in their care just because people want them. As a pet, we have an idea in our mind of how often we should feed a pet or how we should care for a pet, and there's just not a whole lot of information out there and the appropriate way of caring for it. So we wanted to bridge that gap of people and get more partisan into qualified homes.

[Chris]
And for people that are interested in finding out more, are you like a membership organization? Do you have a way set up for them to give you $100,000 grants?

[Luke B.]
I don't think we're set up to take any donations now that we can use as, like a tax write off. But if people want to throw money at us, we're never going to refuse that. We use any donations we get from selling, like, a Tshirt or just somebody wanted to do it out of the kindness of their heart. Just go straight back into the care of the tortoises that we have at home that we use for ambassadors to teach people. So it goes toward their food, their vet bills. It goes into a side fund. We don't pocket any of that money. We could do that in good conscience. But, yeah, we have the savingslopeop.org, and we have a social media account. I think we're on Facebook, but we're definitely on Instagram at Savingslowpoke, and we'll.

[Chris]
Try and figure out a way to get some video of Slowpoke into the show notes so that people can see that she's actually okay after having been a definitely.

[Luke B.]
She gets around. She still moves in circles sometimes, but she gets to where she needs to go, and she still eats, she still drinks. She still does everything a tortoise can do. She even still digs. She digs her own little palates. It's just like a small depression that tortoises dressed at during the day in our backyard. She digs them under the plants that we have back there. Yep.

[Chris]
They had the pleasure of meeting Slowpoke recently, and I can attest that. She's a good looking tortoise.

[Luke B.]
She's becoming a star.

[Tim S.]
I have encountered wild three legged tortoises, by the way, who just keep going. They're tough animals, very tough, and they figure out a way. They're remarkable.

[Luke B.]
Yeah, we've come across some that have been clearly clipped by a car. Just got shell. It looks shattered, smashed in, and that thing rolled up and heels, and that was just a goofy looking tortoise out there in its thing.

[Tim S.]
They're super tough. We should draw attention to a couple of points. Do not remove a wild tortoise from Wild Habitat as what really has to stop. And then if you really want a tortoise, there's a huge pool of captive tortoises waiting for qualified adopting families. So their calfishing game does the registration. And Luke undoubtedly knows more about that aspect than I do, but that's something to point out.

[Chris]
Yeah, we'll make sure and get the relevant info into the show notes and.

[Luke B.]
Any of that info. That's why saving Slowpoke was made. If you need help finding that info, finding the adoption paperwork, finding the right resources to do research, that's where we are. We're there to help you navigate this whole world so that you don't have to waste time fumbling around. You can get right to it. So just hit us up if you have any questions about adopting or Karen for a tortoise.

[Tim S.]
It's killer branding, man. The name is brilliant name. I think the value tortoises really give us is by showing us a different way to be Earthlings. And we desperately need that. We need these examples. Like, I look at a raven. I go, Raven is just a feathered human being. It's just a feathered guy. But a tortoise has a very different way of operating, and we need that. We really do need to learn how to be gentle on our surroundings.

[Chris]
Tim shields, Luke Basulto, thanks so much.

[Chris]
For coming on the podcast.

[Tim S.]
A pleasure.

[Chris]
Thanks for having us.

[Tim S.]
Go tortoises.

[Bouse Parker]
This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced and edited by Chris Clarke. Alicia will be back next episode. Personally, I'm relieved. This episode was kind of a sausage fest. Podcast artwork by the intriguing Martin Mancha theme music is by Brightside Studio. Other music via slipstream and envato elements. Follow us on Instagram and at 90 Mi from Needles and on Facebook@facebook.com. ninetymiles from Needles. We have quit Twitter. Take that, space billionaire. Subscribe to our email newsletter at 90 Milesfromnedles.com newsletter. Listen to us at 90 Miles from Needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also hear us at other desertradio.com. Help us by leaving a review on your favorite podcast app. Thank you to our newest supporters, Yosaku and John Patzold on Patreon and Mary Buxton on Kofi support this podcast by visiting us at Nine 0 Mile from Needles.com Patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as $5. Or visit Nine 0 Mile from Needles.com Kofi to make a onetime contribution. Our supporters enjoy privileges, including early access to episodes. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Coffin and Lara Rozzell. All characters on this podcast scribbled all night, rocking and rolling over lofty incantations, which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish. This is Bous Parker reminding you that tortoises were here first. See you next time.

[Chris]
Sit heart, sit! good dog.