Georgia Closes a 10-Year Bet on Gopher Tortoises

Georgia permanently protected its 65th viable gopher tortoise population on Sept. 24, 2025, closing a target state biologists had set with federal counterparts in 2015. The last piece is a 1,210-acre easement south of Cordele that holds more than 250 tortoises.

Georgia and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service treated 65 protected colonies as the threshold for long-term survival in the state, and as the number that would help keep federal listing off the books.

Georgia Set the 65-Population Target With Federal Biologists

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources announced it had reached its goal of permanently protecting 65 viable tortoise populations. When the Georgia Gopher Tortoise Conservation Initiative formed in 2015, only 36 of 125 known viable populations in the state had that protection.

Matt Elliott, chief of wildlife conservation for DNR, later said the agency worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service to set the 65-colony figure after early surveys showed Georgia lacked enough large, protected groups. A population counts as viable only if it holds at least 250 adults. The initiative also aimed to conserve 100,000 acres of south Georgia habitat and restore longleaf pine woods the animals need.

DNR Commissioner Walter Rabon tied the finish line to listing policy as much as to wildlife.

We’re incredibly proud of the success of these conservation efforts. Avoiding federal listing not only helps protect wildlife, it also prevents potential economic impacts for our state.

Walter Rabon, commissioner, Georgia Department of Natural Resources

That is the wager in plain language. Lock enough big colonies, keep the state reptile off the Endangered Species Act list, and keep the land-use rules that come with listing off pinelands that still grow timber, host quail, and sit near training ranges.

THE 10-YEAR SCOREBOARD

The table is the bet’s ledger, not a recovery certificate. Twenty-nine populations were added over 10 years, and 60 known viable colonies still sit outside the protected net.

The 1,210-Acre Easement South of Cordele

Site 65 is a conservation easement on the Turner and Crisp county line, just south of Cordele. Austin McKinney of Newnan signed it with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. The rolling tract has been in his family 100 years or more. DNR says the woods hold groundcover, longleaf pine, and outcrops of Altamaha grit, and that bird-dog field trials run there each year.

We’ve always valued uplands, quail and wildlife. We take this seriously, and we’re looking forward to continuing to improve the habitats.

Austin McKinney, landowner, Turner and Crisp counties

The easement is the model the initiative used when it could not buy land outright. Title stays private. Development rights come off. Tortoises, and the open, sandy ground they need, stay. Terrance O. Rudolph, Georgia’s NRCS state conservationist, called the Cordele deal an example of federal money joined to state and private resources.

Public purchases still did part of the work. DNR lists the Ceylon and Alapaha River wildlife management areas among the tracts that moved colonies into the protected column, with money that ran from foundations and federal grants to the U.S. Defense Department and the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Program.

Utilities, the Army, and a Newnan Landowner

The coalition grew to nearly 30 agencies, conservation groups, companies, foundations, and private landowners. The membership list is where the wager’s other parties show up. Beside DNR and the Fish and Wildlife Service sit the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, Georgia Power, Southern Power, Pattillo Industrial Real Estate, the Georgia Forestry Commission, and the Georgia Department of Transportation.

Fort Benning’s environmental shop put the military’s interest on the record. Large tortoise populations on and around training land can complicate live-fire space if the animals become a listed species. Permanent protection that is compatible with the mission is the installation’s preferred off-ramp.

The initiative’s effort was not only important to informing the federal listing decision for tortoises but also in perpetually securing mission-compatible land uses around military installations.

Brent Widener, Environmental Division chief, U.S. Army Fort Benning

NRCS has said more than 80 percent of gopher tortoise habitat is privately owned. That is why an easement on a family tract south of Cordele belongs in the same sentence as a chamber of commerce and a power company. Listing would have reached into working woods, not only into parks.

Peter Maholland, Georgia field office supervisor for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said partners mapped high-quality colonies and built “tortoise sheds,” a landscape unit borrowed from watershed planning, a design he credited to Elliott and the late Don Imm of the Service. Eleanor Ratchford of the Knobloch Family Foundation called the mix of state, federal, nonprofit, and private money the point of the exercise.

WHO WROTE THE WAGER

• State wildlife: Georgia DNR ran the surveys, set the 65-colony target with FWS, and now manages fire and restoration on protected ground.
• Federal land and farm programs: Fish and Wildlife, NRCS, the Forest Service, and the Defense Department put easements, grants, and mission lands into the same count.
• Working land: Private owners such as McKinney, plus timber-adjacent firms and utilities, supplied the acres that public budgets could not buy.
• Conservation money: Foundations, land trusts, The Nature Conservancy, the Georgia Conservancy, and Tall Timbers filled gaps in purchase and outreach.

Steve Friedman, DNR’s former real estate chief, said the same push “prevented the need to list the gopher tortoise and saved over 100,000 acres of land critical for so many other species of concern,” much of it headed for public hunting and recreation. The Georgia Conservancy, a founding partner, dates that 100,000-acre mark to 2022, three years before the 65th colony closed.

The 2022 Finding That Closed the Candidate File

The listing chip was cashed before Cordele. On Oct. 12, 2022, the Fish and Wildlife Service found that listing the gopher tortoise rangewide was not warranted and that the Eastern DPS of the gopher tortoise is not warranted for listing. The Western distinct population segment, west of the Mobile and Tombigbee rivers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and western Alabama, stayed threatened, the status it has held since 1987.

Eastern animals, including those in Georgia, had been candidates since a 2011 finding. DNR says the Service credited the partnerships with conserving the species and even documenting populations that had not been on the books. NRCS, writing after that finding, said the decision reduced regulatory oversight for landowners across four southeastern states.

THE WAGER’S CALENDAR

1. 1987: Western gopher tortoises are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
2. 2011: Eastern tortoises become federal listing candidates.
3. 2015: Georgia launches the initiative at 36 protected colonies of 125 known viable populations, with a 65-colony target.
4. Oct. 12, 2022: Fish and Wildlife finds the Eastern DPS not warranted for listing and confirms the Western DPS as threatened.
5. 2022: Partners hit the 100,000-acre habitat mark.
6. 2023: The Center for Biological Diversity and Nokuse Education sue over the eastern listing denial.
7. Sept. 24, 2025: DNR announces the 65th protected population on 1,210 acres south of Cordele.
8. July 10, 2026: The IUCN publishes a Red List assessment ranking the species critically endangered.

Read that list in order and the 65th site is a closing entry, not the decision that took Georgia off the candidate list. The 2022 finding arrived when partners were still short of 65. The Conservancy’s own tally for fall 2022 was 62 permanently protected populations. Georgia still finished the number it had promised.

Why the IUCN Still Calls the Species Critically Endangered

The International Union for Conservation of Nature published a new assessment on July 10, 2026, moving the gopher tortoise from vulnerable, its category since 1996, to critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. Assessors dated their work May 21, 2025, months before DNR closed the 65-count. They estimate populations have fallen by about 80 percent over 120 years, three tortoise generations, and that longleaf habitat is down to less than 3 percent of its original extent.

Hunter Howell, a coauthor of the assessment, said translocation programs that move animals off development sites often lack follow-up on whether those animals survive.

Despite there being dozens of both translocated and natural populations studied across the species’ range, scientists have never recorded a single population with a positive population growth rate.

Hunter Howell, coauthor, IUCN gopher tortoise assessment

Leyna Stemle, another coauthor, warned that colonies are getting smaller and more cut off as towns spread across the Southeast, and that the burrows support animals such as gopher frogs. Tracey Tuberville, a tortoise researcher at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, pointed to a quieter failure than bulldozers: woods that are protected on paper and then left unburned until they close over and become useless to a sun-loving tortoise, with a long lag before the animals actually leave.

Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said federal officials should reopen the eastern listing file. Kevin Loope, a research scientist who reviewed the Service’s 2021 species status assessment, said the tortoise deserves a new look based on an updated population model. The 2023 suit by the Center and Nokuse Education is the legal form of that argument. Fish and Wildlife’s 2022 finding still stands until a court or a new review moves it.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Fish and Wildlife, 2022: The eastern population, including Georgia, did not meet the test for federal listing; the western population remains threatened.
• IUCN assessors, 2026: The species as a whole now meets the test for critically endangered, with steep past loss and no monitored population shown to be growing.
• Center for Biological Diversity and allied scientists: The 2022 finding leaned on a flawed model and should be done again; state rules that move tortoises off construction sites do not save the habitat those animals leave.

Those positions can sit together only if “protected” and “recovering” are different words. Georgia’s 65 colonies are a land-status count. The Red List is a trend count. The argument that now travels is the second one. Georgia’s acre ledger barely registered beside the extinction-risk headline, which ran as a story about an animal whose numbers keep sliding even in places that look saved.

Burrows That Shelter More Than 300 Species

Gopher tortoises are the only land tortoise in the eastern United States, plate-sized reptiles of the Coastal Plain from South Carolina to Louisiana. They are Georgia’s state reptile. DNR calls them a keystone species because their burrows are used by more than 300 other animals, including the federally threatened eastern indigo snake, which winters in the holes.

Elliott has used a broader label, umbrella species, for the same idea. Protect the sandy, open woods the tortoise needs, and other animals of that ground come with it. He has named eastern indigo snakes, Florida pine snakes, and gopher frogs among the species that gained cover as tortoise sites were secured. The Conservancy adds the striped newt. In July 2026 the Georgia Forestry Commission noted that indigo snakes, the longest native snake in North America, are using tortoise burrows in restored longleaf stands in the state.

Both the tortoise and the indigo snake remain priority species in Georgia’s State Wildlife Action Plan. Monica Thornton, executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Georgia, said the 65 protected populations proved partners could “think big and work together.” The burrow count is why a chamber of commerce and a snake society were in the same coalition. The woods are the product. The tortoise is the survey stake.

What 65 Protected Colonies Still Require

Elliott was careful, on the day DNR claimed the goal, not to treat land protection as the end of the job.

Conserving species and habitats doesn’t end with land protection. Keeping wildlife like the gopher tortoise on the landscape is a long-term proposition and requires continuing management like prescribed burning and sometimes more intensive restoration of degraded habitats.

Matt Elliott, Wildlife Conservation Section chief, Georgia DNR

He has also said the tortoise will stay a high-priority species in the state plan and on the state-protected list. In a January 2026 note he was still at 65 populations and was talking about unfragmented conservation opportunity areas, not about walking away. Partners have said work to protect more colonies will continue. Sixty known viable populations remain outside the permanent net.

STILL ON THE GROUND

• Fire: Open longleaf and wiregrass have to be burned on a short cycle or the canopy closes and tortoises lose forage and nesting sun.
• The other 60: The 65-colony target was a minimum, not a cap, and most known viable groups still lack permanent protection.
• Growth, not occupancy: Adult tortoises can linger in a declining colony for decades, so a site can look occupied while recruitment fails.
• Corridors: Elliott wants the next phase to borrow the initiative’s lessons for linkages between sites, not only for more isolated easements.

Biologists still sit down with developers to cut the damage of new projects on tortoises and burrows. That work is the daily cost of staying off the federal list. It is also the gap the IUCN authors keep naming: moving an animal is not the same as keeping a breeding group in place.

Georgia closed the number it published in 2015. The Cordele easement put more than 250 tortoises under a permanent paper roof. The 2022 finding still keeps eastern listing off the table, and the 2026 Red List still puts the same species in the highest risk class short of extinction in the wild. The bet that 65 colonies would satisfy a listing threshold is complete. The bet that those colonies are growing has not been won on any monitored site the assessors could find.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Does Georgia Protect Gopher Tortoises Without a Federal Listing?

State law already protects the tortoise across the rest of its range, including Georgia, and DNR still treats it as a high-priority animal. In the 2025 State Wildlife Action Plan the species is listed as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need at the High Conservation Concern tier, so survey, fire, and easement work continue even though the Eastern DPS is not on the federal list.

What Did the IUCN Call the Gopher Tortoise Before 2026?

The Red List last ranked the species in 1996, as vulnerable. The 2026 move to critically endangered was the first formal IUCN revision in 30 years, and it sits beside other Red List entries such as the North Atlantic right whale, the red wolf, and the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle.

Do the Protected Sites Stay Open for Hunting and Field Trials?

Some do. Friedman said much of the more than 100,000 acres conserved through the initiative will be available for public hunting and recreation, and McKinney’s Turner and Crisp tract still hosts annual bird-dog field trials. An easement can bar subdivision and still leave traditional rural uses in place if the deed is written that way.

What Is the Difference Between a Viable Population and the Cordele Count?

Viable, in the initiative’s rule, means at least 250 adult tortoises on a site. The Cordele easement is described as holding more than 250 tortoises, which meets that bar; juveniles are not what the 250-adult threshold is counting, and a site can clear the number and still fail later if adults are not replacing themselves.