Egmont Key fire caused few losses in box turtle population, USFWS official says

A biological assessment performed on Egmont Key following a lightning-induced fire that burned a third of the island showed that most of the wildlife population went unscathed.

Less than 20 box turtles were killed in the fire, said Stan Garner with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fire management division. The last survey done on the box turtle population counted 1,000 individuals, Garner said.

No gopher tortoises or birds died.

He added that there were false reports of the fire initially being a prescribed burn. Egmont Key hasn’t had a prescribed burn since 2009, he said.

Garner thought the confusion could have come about if people saw firefighters doing “backburning,” a technique used in setting a fire just ahead of the main fire to stop it from going any further.

The lightning-induced fire, which was spotted early July 26, burned 80 acres of the 240-acre island. The burned area was a “thick, tangled mass of forest” which Garner said birds did not use. A designated national wildlife refuge for shore birds and other wildlife is on the island’s southernmost point.

This story was originally published August 12, 2016 at 6:11 PM with the headline "Egmont Key fire caused few losses in box turtle population, USFWS official says."