Fort Ord redevelopment largely ignores the declining species.

The funniest thing about badgers, says UC Davis doctoral student Jessie Quinn, is their body shape. The neckless animals are shaped like pillows, their skin draped over a muscle core, making it tricky for researchers to catch them and outfit them with radio transmitters.

“You really can’t get a handle on them,” she says with a laugh. “You can pick up a whole handful of skin and there’s still more, so they can twist around and bite you.”

Quinn is writing her dissertation on the effects of habitat fragmentation on American badgers, who need large tracts of grassland or sagebrush to survive, and whose numbers are believed to be declining. The California Department of Fish and Game has named the badger a “species of special concern,” but officials admit they don’t know much about the elusive animal. To fill in the blanks, the department gave Quinn a grant to prepare a statewide badger population status report. Data suggesting that the creatures are in bad shape could lead to new restrictions to California land use planning—particularly in Monterey County.

Quinn scoped the state for a suitable study population and settled on Fort Ord, where more than a dozen badgers have burrowed into the acres of grassland and chaparral. With the help of a professional trapper, Quinn caught 10 resident badgers with wire snares. Veterinarian Dr. Mike Murray of the Monterey Bay Aquarium then implanted transmitters into their abdomens (as he’s done to hundreds of sea otters, the badgers’ cousins in the Mustelidae family). Quinn then released the badgers where she’d found them and, with the help of volunteers and BLM staff, tracked their movements from May 2005 to December 2006.

Fort Ord is about 44 square miles, and surrounded on all sides by development. Quinn’s four outfitted males traversed territories of about 10 square miles and the six females about half that area, without much overlap. The crowding of the former base’s badgers pushes some to extend their home ranges into the Santa Lucia Mountains, which means regularly crossing fields, the CSUMB campus, and busy roads to get to the protected areas in Los Padres National Forest.

Roads are particularly perilous for badgers, who are equipped with poor vision and a propensity to travel at night. Quinn logged eight squashed badgers on Highway 68, Reservation Road, River Road and General Jim Moore Boulevard over the course of her study. None of them were among the 10 she was tracking, but she often worried about an old male, caught at the fire station near Toro Park, who regularly crossed Highway 68 to Marks Ranch.

Roads aren’t the only threat. Fort Ord is adjacent to homes and agricultural areas where landowners tend to use large amounts of pesticides, which can take a toll on badgers’ health. Rodenticides are particularly toxic to badgers.

And, of course, there’s the slow but steady encroachment of development. Under the Fort Ord Reuse Plan, about 25 square miles of mainly BLM land are to be protected as habitat, and just over 6 square miles used for recreation. The remaining 12.5 square miles is open to development.

As badger habitat is paved over, the animals will be forced to cross roads with increasing traffic in an attempt to expand their ranges into undeveloped areas. “I don’t know how well they’ll deal with that,” Quinn says.

BLM resource ecologist Bruce Delgado, who works out of the Fort Ord office, hopes Quinn’s results will help the agency manage for badger survival. “Our job is to protect the ecosystem,” he says. “Badgers, along with coyotes and other top predators, are important to keep the whole system stable and intact. And they’re declining throughout California, so if they decline in Fort Ord, they’re heading toward an endangered status and we might lose them.”

While Ford Ord’s three endangered plants get clear legal protection, resident badgers—and other “species of special concern” including burrowing owls, loggerhead shrikes, tri-colored blackbirds, coast horned lizards and black legless lizards—get short shrift. “There isn’t anything in the [state] Fish and Game code that gives specific protections to that particular critter,” says DFG environmental scientist Dave Johnston.

Species of special concern are generally considered “rare” under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and any related environmental reports should take impacts on badgers into account, Johnston says. Any given development might only affect one or two individuals, but the cumulative effect could be hard on the species as a whole.

Developers who fail to consider resident badgers might not be violating the law, but they may be opening the door to legal accusations of inadequate CEQA compliance. “It’s a gray area,” Johnston says. “At the end of the day, you’re coming down to a matter of opinion.”

The Fort Ord Reuse Plan’s Environmental Impact Report acknowledges that developments will reduce the amount of habitat available for badgers, among other species. But because the remaining grassland will be preserved, and because developments are required to reduce impacts on sensitive species, the loss of grasslands is not a significant impact and no mitigation is required, the report concludes.

None of the EIRs completed for the four advanced-stage Fort Ord developments—Cypress Knolls, East Garrison, University Village and Marina Heights—considers badgers.

Though Quinn hasn’t been able to pinpoint historical or current population numbers, her research suggests that American badgers, once widespread across California, have steadily disappeared from the Central Valley and sprawling urban areas while hanging on along the Central Coast. The Fort Ord population is perhaps the most significant, but Quinn also notes badger sightings in Toro County Park and the Carmel Valley—including on the 30-acre former airport property where a developer has proposed a 39-unit subdivision.

The uncertainty around badger population numbers is largely due to the animal’s habit of hanging out underground all day—in multiple burrows that can be 6 feet deep, spiral-shaped with multiple chambers—and coming to the surface primarily at night to hunt for gophers, voles, lizards, snakes, insects and the occasional distracted bird. “Badgers are really under-detected,” Quinn says. “They’re just not something that somebody sees.”

Quinn’s research showing badger movement between Fort Ord and Marks Ranch, a new trust acquisition, provoked the Big Sur Land Trust to undertake its own study of wildlife movement along a route composed largely of private land. The goal is to connect those pockets of habitat to create a protected wildlife corridor between Fort Ord and the Santa Lucia Range.

Quinn predicts that if current development trends continue, local badgers’ habitat is likely to be squeezed more and more. “To some extent that could be compensated by raising awareness,” she says. “Most people seem really amused and positive about the prospect that badgers live nearby.”