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If you are relatively new to the Morongo Basin you are probably familiar with our Desert Tortoise, a native species here in the Mojave Desert. What you may not know is that there are many residents here that have and care for tortoises at their homes. These tortoises are usually rescues or perhaps wanderers that ventured into a homestead built near their habitat. There are hundreds of these houses around the Hi Desert – many located near the northern border of the National Park.
The desert tortoise is listed as a threatened species under the federal and California Endangered Species Acts, and removing a native tortoise from the wild is illegal.
However, these house-kept tortoises are perfectly legal to have, as long as you have a license for them. But what does someone do if they sell their home or move from the high desert – leaving a tortoise without the things he or she depends on?
That’s a problem the planned Tortoise Rescue drop-off area is hoping to address. The recent agreement between the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians and the National Park Service includes a planned tortoise sanctuary where people can safely drop off a tortoise they can no longer care for, allowing them to live out the rest of their days in safety and comfort without the risk of spreading a human-borne respiratory disease that could be devastating to an already fragile and threatened population of native tortoises in the National Park.
The tortoise rescue area is planned for an area of land behind the Tortoise Rock Casino, that will also be host to a campground and new trailhead.
You can hear more about the Tortoise Drop off area – as well as many other changes that are planned for the land between Tortoise Rock Casino and Joshua Tree National Park in Gary Daigneault’s interview with David Smith on “The Up Close Show,” right here:
