Save the Desert Tortoise with fake tortoises.

The desert tortoise has lots of problems, but a big one is ravens. As more people move into the Southern Californian deserts, more ravens come to eat their trash. Ravens also love to eat baby tortoises. One article I found called ravens in this context "subsidized predators" which I thought was a neat term. Result: less tortoises.

In my search, I found a few ideas on how to fix this. 1.Kill ravens by shooting them. This seems laborious and probably not too effective. 2.Clean up trash - haw haw. 3. Raise turtles and turn them loose when grown up with hard shells. 4. Hide baby turtles in holes. etc etc.

Ravens are really smart. They have culture, and teach things to each other and to their chicks. That could be used against them. I propose that fake baby turtles that can fool a raven be created. They might have a hard baked glazed or waxed pastry shell with an interior of some sort of dogfood-like preserved meat. The hard pastry shell would prevent lesser predators (eg ants) from getting the meat. They would be colored like a baby tortoise. The meat within would be poisoned - but the critical thing is that it would not be lethal. It would be something like ipecac - the raven would get very sick. It would remember that baby tortoises are bad. Tortoises would gradually be off the diet of ravens.

The trick is making a realistic tortoise mimic. This would be all about trial and error, and watching the ravens. I doubt that the fake needs to move to fool the raven - it is a tortoise after all. The other good thing is that ravens cluster around trash, and so one would not need to spread fakes over the whole desert - they could be concentrated at trash dumps.