Newsflash
March 17, 2008 – Desert Tortoise Relocation Challenged: Proposed “Mitigation” for Fort Irwin Expansion May Do More Harm Than Good
Though surface temperatures in the Mojave Desert may soar above 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and dip below freezing on winter nights, the desert tortoise is able to exist in this extreme environment through special adaptations and behavioral strategies. This tortoise spends most of its life underground, in protective burrows that may be as deep as ten feet. But grazing cattle and off-road vehicles trample the burrows, leaving the tortoise exposed to the desert’s extreme temperatures.
ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROFILE
PROTECTION STATUS: Threatened (Mojave population); not listed (Sonoran population)
YEAR PLACED ON LIST: 1990 (Mojave population)
CRITICAL HABITAT: 6.4 million acres in California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona designated in 1994
RECOVERY PLAN: 1994 (currently being rewritten)
RANGE: Southern California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and extreme northern Arizona (Mojave population); lower elevations of Arizona (Sonoran population)
THREATS: Livestock grazing and off-road vehicle use, road construction, urban development, agriculture, introduced diseases, and predation by ravens and feral dogs
POPULATION TREND: Since the early 1970s, biologists have noted that desert tortoise populations are declining; populations have declined by as much as 90 percent since the 1980s.
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SAVING THE Desert tortoise
Desert tortoises have lived in the deserts of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah since the Pleistocene. In the early years of the twentieth century, they still thrived within the Southwest’s arid landscapes: as many as 1,000 tortoises per square mile once inhabited the Mojave. But by the end of the century, this population of the desert tortoise was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Livestock grazing and urban development, along with the ever-increasing use of off-road vehicles, continue to degrade the tortoise’s vanishing habitat.
Since 1997, the Center has been working to protect the Mojave population of threatened desert tortoises. By challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s grazing practices on arid public lands, we have been successful in protecting millions of acres of fragile tortoise habitat. The Center has also actively sought to limit off-road vehicle use throughout the desert tortoise’s range.
In 2000, we made significant gains for the desert tortoise when, as a result of our legal efforts, the Bureau of Land Management permanently cancelled all livestock grazing on 276,125 acres of the Granite Mountains Grazing Allotment. In 2002, the Center and its allies won another landmark settlement in which 1.9 million acres of the California Desert Conservation Area were protected against livestock grazing and 18,000 acres of tortoise habitat were closed to off-road vehicle access.
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Contact: Ileene Anderson
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