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Researchers are working to save a tortoise that has been in the American Southwest for millions of years - the Mojave Desert tortoise, to be specific. It's considered a threatened species, but in California, there are now extra protections in place, as Nate Perez from NPR's Climate Desk reports.
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NATE PEREZ, BYLINE: Patrick Emblidge guides me through the Mojave Desert, near the town of Joshua Tree east of LA. We walk past thorny shrubs and the town's namesake trees.
PATRICK EMBLIDGE: What we'll do is go up this canyon.
PEREZ: Emblidge is with the conservation organization Mojave Desert Land Trust. Before that, he researched desert tortoises at the U.S. Geological Survey in the Southwest.
EMBLIDGE: And there's a lot of really nice tortoise burrows up in there.
PEREZ: We're out here looking for the Mojave Desert tortoise. They live here in California, parts of Nevada, Arizona and northwestern Mexico. And they're hard to find because they spend most of their time underground. Their numbers have also plummeted, explains Emblidge.
EMBLIDGE: They're seriously in danger of going extinct.
PEREZ: Emblidge says some estimates show that Mojave Desert tortoise populations have declined by 90% over the last 40 years. That's because of disease, off-road vehicles and development encroaching on their habitat. Cameron Barrows, who studies deserts at UC Riverside, describes tortoise decline as...
CAMERON BARROWS: Death from a thousand cuts.
PEREZ: Barrows says climate change is also a major reason why tortoises are disappearing.
BARROWS: It's not minor at all. It is - it's a very important aspect of what's going on with tortoises.
PEREZ: Climate change makes temperatures hotter and droughts last longer. And during California's epic drought between 2012 and 2016, scientists saw a large decline in female tortoises, which could affect the population's survival. And Emblidge says that would hurt the desert's ecosystem.
EMBLIDGE: If tortoises are going extinct, we're doing something wrong, and everything else is suffering as well.
PEREZ: Barrows says the Mojave Desert tortoise is nearly gone from low elevations at Joshua Tree National Park.
BARROWS: They're still doing fine at the higher elevations, but at the lower elevations, really, really quite rare and increasingly so.
PEREZ: In 1989, California declared the desert tortoise as threatened. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did the same thing a year later. Those efforts led to a recovery plan and conservation efforts. But this June, California went a step further and listed the species as endangered. Still, researchers are skeptical that the state's new designation will give the tortoise the protection it needs. That includes Kristina Drake. She led the Desert Tortoise Recovery Office at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She left the agency in the spring after taking the Trump administration's deferred resignation offer.
KRISTINA DRAKE: I don't expect there to be much additional federal funding to support the tortoise with the current administration.
PEREZ: That's because around 700 staffers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were fired or resigned earlier this year, making habitat protection and conservation efforts much harder. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's spokesperson, Garrett Peterson, said in an emailed statement that the agency cannot comment on personnel or congressional matters regarding funding. But researchers, including Drake, say protected places are critical to preserving desert tortoise habitat, like here in Joshua Tree. In fact, there's an area near Bakersfield that since the 1970s has been set aside for the desert tortoise. Researchers say that's translated to a slow uptick in the number of tortoises in that protected area.
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PEREZ: Here in the Mojave Desert, we find a tortoise burrow in the canyon. Clay Noss and Patrick Emblidge, with the land trust, and I drop to our knees and look inside.
CLAY NOSS: Oh, she's in there.
PEREZ: Is she?
NOSS: Yeah.
EMBLIDGE: Good.
PEREZ: Hello.
I see the tortoise's stubby feet and big shell. We make eye contact. Maybe we have a moment.
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PEREZ: Further up the canyon, we come across another tortoise. It's hidden among the rocks. Emblidge and Noss say it's pretty special to see two tortoises in one day. And the best way to secure their survival, they say, is to continue to protect the desert landscape.
Nate Perez, NPR News.
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