Six months after top Florida officials advanced a deal that would swap 324 acres of state forest to a golf course company, Chase Pirtle hiked through the woods to document the creatures that stood to lose their home.

He found a threatened indigo snake basking in the sun, a rare animal some scientists spend years trying to spot. Florida mice, an imperiled species with distinctive big ears and hind feet, scurried through the sand, captured on a night camera. And Pirtle, who leads a nonprofit research group hired by the Sierra Club, tallied at least 112 burrows of endangered gopher tortoises — more than half of which showed signs of active use.

“Every acre serves significant importance,” said Pirtle, director of the Ashton Biological Preserve, considered a leader of gopher tortoise protections in Florida. “The loss of sandhill habitat in this state is horrific, and every little habitat that we can hang on to is extremely important right now.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis, along with the three members of the Florida Cabinet, spent less than 30 seconds in June discussing the swap before voting to move it forward. The deal meant the state would give the forest land to Cabot Citrus Farms, a luxury golf resort in Hernando County looking to expand its neighboring operation, in exchange for 861 acres of timber land in Cedar Key. Environmental groups have decried the proposal, saying the state forest is home to fragile habitat in need of protection.

After the vote, responsibility fell to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to grant final approval to the project. It remained virtually unknown to the public until the Tampa Bay Times revealed the deal in August, a time when DeSantis was already contending with widespread outrage over a separate proposal to add golf courses to state parks.

In the months since, there have been no signs of movement.

According to the June Cabinet meeting agenda, four requirements would have to be met in order for the trade to materialize: the Florida Forest Service would have to sign off, Cabot needs to buy the Cedar Key land and the golf company has to submit two separate applications to the state.

None has happened. The agenda does not list any deadlines.

“We’re not hearing anything, and because of that we believe the project is being put on the backburner,” said Tom St. Clair, president and conservation chairperson of the Hernando Audubon Society.

Property records in Levy County confirm that the timber land on Cedar Key has not been sold to Cabot. Neither the land’s owners, JTMR Timber LLC, nor Cabot responded to requests for information about the potential sale via email and voicemail.

A group within the Department of Environmental Protection needs to approve the swap. It’s called the Acquisition and Restoration Council. It has met three times since the Cabinet advanced the deal. The project wasn’t on the agenda for each of those meetings.

Rick Dolan, Director of the Florida Forest Service who’s a member of the council, confirmed that no proposal concerning the land deal has come before the group.

“If and when there is one, it will be evaluated based on statutory guidelines which establish Florida’s conservation goals,” he said in a statement.

When asked when the swap could come up for a vote, Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson Alexandra Kuchta, declined to answer.

“I don’t have any additional updates to share at this time,” she wrote in an email.

The idea for the swap was initiated by Cabot, according to the Cabinet agenda, when company representatives approached the state with a desire to “expand their current operation.” The idea that a developer could be granted public forest land on demand has alarmed environmentalists, who have warned that this deal would shatter precedent for land conservation in Florida. Multiple observers, including Eric Draper, who worked under the DeSantis administration as the parks director, have also said the state has deviated from normal procedure in advancing the swap.

In a summer when Floridians were already outraged about the now-scuttled plans to develop state parks, news of this second attempt to add golf to public land prompted residents to show up demanding answers at a meeting of an obscure government body that manages the Cabot Citrus Farms golf resort community.

Internal email documents revealed one high-ranking forestry official questioned the deal, the Times has previously reported.

Records also showed DeSantis’ office helped add the proposed land swap to the Cabinet’s agenda. The governor’s deputy chief of staff, Cody Farrill, worked to draft agenda language with environmental agency officials a day before the rest of the Cabinet was officially notified of the new item. The governor’s office didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment on the status of the deal.

Other officials are mum as well. The Times emailed all five members of the Hernando County Commission asking about the land swap. None replied. For two months, environmental groups have also tried to get clarity from commissioners, to no avail.

At the end of September, a team of biologists and land managers surveyed the state forest to document the plant and animal species as part of a formal evaluation. In a 31-page report, experts were clear in their findings: The forest “undoubtedly has significant conservation value.”

For one, the land is predominantly sandhill, a rare and declining habitat the state prioritizes protecting. Second, it’s home to gopher tortoises and is likely habitat for black bears, threatened indigo snakes and at least ten imperiled plant species. And crucially, the entire plot of land is within the area recognized by the state as the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a sweeping network of land intended as a pathway for animals to roam unimpeded by development.

The evaluators said they used the state’s own criteria for determining that the land is worthy of conservation.