Protecting wildlife at Rolling Hills — a successful turtle relocation

Sometimes building communities means protecting the ones already living there. 🐢

Community collaboration is at the heart of what we do at Southland Consulting Engineers — and sometimes that means helping a few slow-moving neighbors find a new home.

The relocation

At our Rolling Hills Subdivision project in Arlington, Texas, our team worked alongside Provident, Texas Turtles, LANDEV, the City of Arlington, and a few enthusiastic neighbors to safely relocate dozens of turtles and other small wildlife from the existing pond inside our active construction footprint to a new pond elsewhere on the site.

Special thanks to Kyle Kruppa for helping coordinate this successful (and surprisingly lively) effort — and to everyone who pitched in to make sure Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, and friends made it to safety.

Why this matters

Brownfield-style redevelopment like Rolling Hills — converting a former golf course into 221 single-family residential lots — inevitably touches existing ecosystems. The pond on the original golf course had become home to a thriving turtle population over the years. Filling or modifying it as part of the new master plan meant moving those residents responsibly.

Coordinating a relocation like this requires:

• Permitting and wildlife coordination with the city
• A qualified herpetological partner (Texas Turtles, in our case)
• A receiving pond on the same site that's stable, vegetated, and right-sized for the population
• A scheduled pause in construction so the relocation can happen safely

It's the kind of work that doesn't always make the engineering scope of work — but it's part of how a project earns the trust of the community and the agencies it serves.

Building responsibly

At Southland, we take community-responsible development seriously. If that means lending a hand — or a shell — we're all in. 🏗️💚