Slow-Growth Turtle : Development: Leona Valley residents hope that the apparent decline of a local species can help them rally support to prevent a housing tract from changing their rural community.

A cynic might call it a shell game.

But to Leona Valley residents, striving to preserve their bucolic homeland from rampant development, one of the last best hopes is a species of turtle.

Not that the valley west of Palmdale is known for the Clemmys marmorata, commonly called the Western pond turtle. Its notoriety stems from its 30 “u-pick” orchards of cherries, apricots and Asian pears.

As for the turtles, Leona Valley residents had spotted them over the years sunning on rocks along the area’s main waterway, Amargosa Creek. Occasionally, the creatures made it up to lawns or crossed the main thoroughfare, Elizabeth Lake Road.

Only in the last few months has the Western pond turtle become the talk of the 18-square-mile valley, which has fewer than 700 residences.

Leona Valley officials discovered that the species, once plentiful in California, is considered by zoologists to be in serious decline. Before long, there was a tiny save the turtles movement.

Residents admit that their newfound animal activism has far less to do with the turtle than with the conservation of their way of life.

The Leona Valley is the proposed site of the largest housing project in the works in Los Angeles County. The Ritter Ranch planned community would take up about 11% of the valley.

Proposed by Merv Adelson and Irwin Molasky, developers of the La Costa resort in Carlsbad, Ritter Ranch would establish a virtual city of 7,200 residences--about 3,000 of which would be built in the valley, along with schools, parks and a golf course.

“If I seem a little paranoid about Ritter Ranch, it’s deja vu, “ said Leona Valley Town Council member Paul Sloane, one of the leaders of the anti-development forces. “I watched the wholesale consumption of the Santa Clarita Valley by developers.”

Leona Valley’s business district consists almost entirely of a market, two restaurants, an automobile repair garage and a video rental store. Down one road, a sign in front of a house reads “Leona Valley Pottery. Open by Chance.”

But the developers have high-placed supporters. The Palmdale City Council spearheaded the annexation last November of part of the valley, so the Ritter Ranch site would be in Palmdale’s city limits. If it is built, other projects on the drawing table are likely to follow.

“I have never been a politically committed person,” said Sloane, 53. “But what they want to do to this valley is an absolute threat to our way of life.”

The Leona Valley Town Council, a five-member elected advisory board, has fought the Ritter Ranch plans, so far unsuccessfully, in venues ranging from Palmdale City Hall to Superior Court in Los Angeles.

Palmdale is so sure Ritter Ranch will become reality that it is moving ahead with a $100-million Amargosa Creek improvement project to control flooding and widen the two-lane Elizabeth Lake Road to four--and in some spots six--lanes.

Enter the turtles. They were not mentioned in the Amargosa project’s environmental impact report, which was approved by the Palmdale City Council in August. But Sloane saw a newspaper article mentioning scientists’ concern for the reptiles. He frantically called state and federal authorities and they eventually led him to Robert Goodman, a graduate student in biological sciences at Cal Poly Pomona. His specialty is herpetology, the study of reptiles.

“As a kid, I guess I was always interested in chasing snakes and frogs and stuff like that,” said Goodman, 25. “In herpetology, you find out how important they are to the ecosystem.”

Goodman is writing his thesis on the Western pond turtle. For the past couple of years, he has explored its few remaining habitats in Southern California, tagging some with electronic transmitters so that their movements can be studied.

“There are only six known viable populations of the turtles below the Santa Clara River,” Goodman said.

The Western pond turtle once was far more plentiful in the state. “The problems began in the 1850s, when they were exploited as a food source,” said Dan Holland, head of the Western Aquatic Turtle Research Corp.

The population declined so drastically that by the 1900s the commercial hunting for them mostly ended. But the turtles had a hard time making a comeback, Holland said, because of residential and commercial development.

As land near waterways was developed, their reproductive cycles were interrupted. Man-made changes to the ecology introduced new enemies, such as the bullfrog, which eats young turtles.

A few weeks ago, Goodman and Holland traveled to the Leona Valley to check out the Amargosa. In a couple of hours, they found eight turtles, including several young ones--a promising sign that the area might be one of the few able to support their life cycle.

Holland concluded that the environmental report was seriously flawed.

“If the issues were not so serious, this thing would be an incredible joke,” he said. “ ‘Grossly inadequate’ would be the kindest thing you could say about it.”

The creek project, he said, would destroy the habitat for not only the turtles, but for several animals.

Palmdale’s deputy director of public works, Doug Dykhouse, disagreed. “There will be very few changes to the creek there. It will stay completely in its natural state.”

Holland recently tried, unsuccessfully, to get the Western pond turtle listed as an endangered species. The lack of such status undermines any use of the turtles as a legal weapon to stop the creek project.

Sloane knows this. “To be candid, we’re just trying to create emotional interest here,” he said. “We’d like to get a bunch of environmentalists shook up over this and put pressure on the city.”

Turtle Trouble

Leona Valley officials have discovered that the Western pond turtle, once plentiful here, is considered to be in serious decline. Now, the area-where the massive Ritter Ranch project is proposed-has become the center of a save the turtles movement.