ten miles of walking
over Clear Mount’s angled ‘peaks’*
yields a bigamist!
just one male gopher tortoise
with eight girlfriends down so deep!
*(A Sunday – February 21, 2016) gopher tortoise location/relocation project in Montverde, Florida, a suburb of greater metropolitan Claremont in the “wilds” of Central Florida’s high sandhills – some broaching better than 250 feet above sea level in a state whose top mountain crests at some 360 feet – on a twenty-acre site above a crystal lake, on a sloping patch of sand and clay we found six females of the genus/species gopherus polyphemus and one male among the fifteen of so deep burrors we located and carefully excavated. Quipped one of our number: buncha happy girls and one rather shopworn and rapidly thinning boy…two of the six female gopher tortoises were just old enough for their plastrons to indicate the animal’s sex. The site was incredibly difficult to negotiate – like walking on a sandy beach in knee-high snakeboots tilted at a 20- to 30-degree angle amidst freeze-damaged vegetation and other surprises. Most of the holes excavated were among the deepest this 20+-year aggregate of tortoise protectors – from development – ever have encountered.)
richwrapper 