Like their cattle on BLM land, family of ranchers stands firm Don’t let the 1,000-pound weight difference fool you — burrowing desert tortoise and plodding cattle are both big grazers. They both eat tender new shoots of wildflowers and grasses. That’s why advocates for the tortoise say keeping cattle out of officially designated critical tortoise habitat, including parts of the proposed Gold Butte National Conservation Area, is so important. Try telling that to the Bundy family, organic-melon farmers and cattle ranchers who have been grazing herds on federal land in the area since the late 1800s. The Bundys, led by family patriarch Cliven Bundy, have been back and forth – and in and out of court – with the Bureau of Land Management over their cattle for a decade and a half, according to records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Center for Biological Diversity. Bundy admits he has cattle roaming free on federal land. But he claims to have forage and access rights to land in the Gold Butte area and own range improvements there. According to BLM records that were part of the request, however, all of Bundy’s rights have been terminated. Bundy said that if the BLM attempts to remove the cattle he will contact the sheriff, and we could have an old-fashioned range war stand-off on our hands....