Desert Race and Tortoises

In your brief report on this year’s Barstow-Las Vegas motorcycle race (Nov. 26), you quote a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson saying that BLM officials went over the course before and after the race and found no desert tortoises. The implications that no tortoises were harmed by the race is completely misleading.

To begin with, tortoises are now hibernating in their burrows and a surface sighting is very unlikely. Looking for tortoises crushed by off-road vehicles would make sense at other times, but not now. The danger is that off-road traffic has crushed burrow entrances, burying the endangered tortoises alive and suffocating them.

Depending upon racing bikers to identify and avoid tortoise burrows in their path, whether in a race or free play, is an absurd policy, or rather an absence of policy.

CURTIS HORTON

Director, Desert Tortoise

Preserve Committee

Pasadena