Celebrating The Role of The Gopher Tortoises in Our Forest

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / May 19, 2025 / National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's and International Paper's Forestland Stewards Partnership Helps The Longleaf Alliance Give Gopher Tortoises a Head Start

Foto: Accesswire

The best way to celebrate Gopher Tortoise Day is to ensure there are more gopher tortoises across their natural range in the southeast United States. Founded in 2013, the Forestland Stewards Partnership between the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and International Paper, funds a variety of forest and wildlife conservation projects across the southeast - including efforts to restore and conserve gopher tortoise populations and longleaf habitat.

Helping gopher tortoises to thrive isn't just good news for tortoises; it also means good news for hundreds of other species that depend in big and small ways on the tortoise in its role as a keystone species.

They are called a ‘keystone species' because more than 350 other animals - like owls, snakes, foxes, toads, skunks, and lizards - use gopher tortoise burrows to shelter from the heat, fires, and predators.
- Kurt Buhlmann, Senior Research Associate, University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory

Gopher tortoises spend most of their lives in burrows that can be more than 20 feet long and eight feet deep.

Forestland Stewards Partnership grants are helping gopher tortoises and their habitat by supporting collaboration between The Longleaf Alliance, the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Eglin Air Force Base and many other partners. These organizations are helping to conserve gopher tortoises threatened by development by translocating, or moving, tortoises from planned development sites to protected habitat and augmenting and restoring gopher tortoise populations through a technique called "head-starting."

In Florida, where relatively large numbers of adult tortoises remain compared to other states, partners have successfully translocated over 3,000 tortoises from planned development sites to Eglin Air Force Base and other sites, where restoration efforts have created suitable habitats in these protected properties.

In South Carolina, where adult tortoises are less abundant, about 350 eggs have been collected from wild populations to hatch in captivity. Hatchling tortoises are reared indoors for one year to achieve larger body sizes than would occur naturally and thus become more resistant to predation. This gives tortoises a greater chance to survive and eventually become subadults.