State outlaws ‘entombing’ of gopher tortoise
"Florida’s gopher tortoises will soon have one fewer threat from humanity.

For more than a decade, state law allowed developers to bury gopher tortoises during construction, even though the state listed the animal as a species of special concern.

Beginning Tuesday, developers will no longer be allowed to entomb gopher tortoises, which are in the process of being reclassified as a threatened species — the new rule will have no effect in Lee or Collier counties because they already don’t allow entombment.

“Not to defend entombment, but what was right about the program was that developers were required to pay a fee that let us buy gopher tortoise habitat someplace else,” said Joy Hill, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokeswoman. “However, because the process allowed entombment, nobody liked it, including developers.”

Nobody knows how many tortoises were entombed under the old system, Hill said."

You may be aware that the existence of this entombment procedure was one of the very reasons why I began this blog. August 1, 2007 was a good day for tortoise-kind.