Wolfstad.com Website Review

Wolfstad - Personal weblog of Arthur and Amy about travel, nature, news and life in Holland and the USA me a second to realize what he was about to do and I quickly yelled at him to STOP! I ran over to the dock and the man explained that he found the an*mal in the middle of the road and was going to ‘help’ it by dropping it in the water. Facepalm! I explained that he was holding a gopher tortoise, that this is a land an*mal and that it would drown if he dropped it in the water. The man backed up and went to release the poor tortoise behind the picnic tables and then left. Is this a common thing? Are there many people picking up gopher tortoises from roads across the state to then go to the nearest lake and drop them in the water, thinking that they’ve done the creature a huge favor by saving it from certain death on the road? I sh*dder to think of how often this happens. Standing there on the dock watching the rocket launch I had this horrible picture in my head of hundreds of tortoise shells laying around me at the bottom of the lake. gopher tortoises in the ocean. Apparently people were misidentifying them as baby sea turtles and there were several reports of wannabe good Samaritans releasing the hatchlings into the sea. Doh! No wonder these an*mals are endangered if people can’t even tell them apart from turtles. A couple of years ago we were at a very swampy park when a guy got out of his car holding a gopher tortoise that he had found a few miles down the road. He was about to release it there in the swamp, thinking that it would be a much safer place than the busy road he had found it at. Of course, in reality the tortoise was yanked from his home territory, where it had made its burrows and had perhaps lived for decades until this person brought it to a park miles from his home with inappropriate habitat where the tortoise might not even be able to ever make a burrow again. We have on numerous occasions seen gopher tortoises in parks where we think the habitat isn’t quite right, making us wonder if someone dropped