Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Harry Reid Says Bundy Ranch Incident is Not Over

That specific fact? 1,000 tortoises per square mile? Maybe not so exaggerated, at least for some areas of the Mohave.

That translates to about 2/3 of an acre per tortoise. These things live much of their lives in a sort of near-suspended animation, a metabolism so low the water in their bladder equates to a year's supply.

Retraction to above.... "In the most densely populated areas, you may find one tortoise per 2.5 acres."...

The flip side of that is their space/food requirements are so low one wonders how much the target restoration population is since it got listed. In other words, how much acreage do ya gotta preserve?

At this point, if I was a disinterested observer living near the Bundy place, I'd go out and count tortoises on that disputed range.

As browsing around revealed; everything from ATV's, to people picking them up and causing them to pee and lose stored water to trash-feeding ravens around towns also preying on young tortoises can hammer them.

http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/deserttortoise.html?gclid=CJ2ny9v64r0CFchQ7AodBC4AHQ

In Texas the Black-capped Vireo (bird) was declared endangered largely on population data from the Austin area, by which stats it shoulda gone extinct years ago. Now this vireo might genuinely be endangered, but it has turned out since then that the Austin area is presently marginal habitat for that species. In other words even if they were common they'd still be dying off around Austin, and that this Austin population has maybe always consisted of birds bred in other areas. Turns out since that there are substantial numbers scattered locally across West Texas, and a college professor friend of mine found a sizeable and previously unknown breeding population in the mountains of North-Central Mexico.

Perhaps the tortoise was classified on the basis of disappearing populations around urban areas too I dunno.

Birdwatcher