The request from nine organizations in a letter sent on Monday to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has the potential to increase tensions in the debate over federal control over vast areas in the West.

The BLM had previously seized Bundy’s cattle for illegally grazing on federal land. However, it backed down in 2014, releasing the livestock to end a standoff with hundreds of armed protesters who came to support the rancher in the Nevada desert.

With Bundy currently jailed in Nevada on charges stemming from the standoff, his relatives have allowed hundreds of cattle to graze on public land around the family’s ranch, said Rob Mrowka, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sent the letter.

The groups are asking the BLM to seize the cattle from the Bundy family, whose ranch is less than 130 km northeast of Las Vegas, and send the animals to farms or sell them for slaughter.

“We recognize that the cattle roundup of 2014 failed due to real threats to agency personnel,” Travis Bruner, executive director of Western Watersheds Project, one of the groups that signed the letter, said in a statement.

“Those ‘threats’ are now mostly imprisoned and awaiting trial, but the crimes against desert tortoise continue,” Bruner said.

BLM spokesman Ronald Evenson said in a statement, “Mr. Bundy’s cattle continue to be in trespass.”

But Evenson said the agency has no immediate plans to round them up, because it continues to work with the U.S. Department of Justice on legal cases against Bundy and others.

Bundy, 70, whose sons led an armed occupation earlier this year at a wildlife refuge in Oregon, was arrested in February at the Portland airport.

He has been indicted on charges that included conspiracy and assault on a law enforcement officer.

Bundy’s sons, Ammon and Ryan, were indicted in connection with the Oregon occupation and face charges in the Nevada standoff. The family is popular with anti-government groups.

Bundy on Tuesday sued President Barack Obama, U.S. Senator Harry Reid and the judge in his criminal case, accusing them of violating his constitutional rights.

— Reporting for Reuters by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles.

The post U.S. asked to seize Bundy cattle to protect tortoises appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

The board of the Metropolitan Water District, a wholesaler that supplies public utilities in heavily populated southern California, will vote on the deal next week, a spokesman said.

Under the arrangement, the southern California agency would be able to use 150,000 acre-feet of surplus water this year if needed, while allowing Nevada to buy it back in future years, the Southern Nevada Water Authority said in a statement on its website.

The deal is one of more than a dozen agreements worked out by the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District, which operates its own pumps at Lake Mead, a huge reservoir on the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam located between Nevada and Arizona.

The Nevada statement said the agency has conducted similar water swaps with Southern California for about a decade. But this deal, struck in part to ensure supplies for Southern California at a time when drought has depleted the state’s reservoirs, involves twice the typical amount of water usually shared, the Southern Nevada Water Authority said.

Such arrangements are called water-banking, because the agency selling the water is in effect storing it elsewhere until needed, lessening the risk that it will evaporate and generating cash and goodwill in the meantime.

If approved by the southern California agency, the deal would allow the Nevada agency to ensure its own supplies in years to come by selling water, some of which would otherwise evaporate, that it does not currently need from Lake Mead.

Earlier this year, the lake, the largest capacity reservoir in the United States, was on track to drop to its lowest level in its 79-year history.

But wet spring weather brought what water managers called “Miracle May,” granting an immediate reprieve from impending cutbacks in the amount of water for sale to agencies in Southern California and elsewhere in the west.

Unless rains continue, however, the lake could again hit dangerously low levels in 2017, the Nevada water agency said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento.

The post Deal would let southern California buy surplus water from Nevada appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

Officials said Nevada’s Lake Mead, the 79-year-old reservoir created by the massive Hoover Dam, registered 1,074.98 feet (327.7 metres) above sea level late on Tuesday, but was able to rise above a critical mark by early on Wednesday morning.

A water level of below 1,075 feet projected for January would translate to water cutbacks in 2016 for Arizona and Nevada. An announcement would be made this August.

But a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman said cutbacks are not expected to be implemented and that projections are for the water level to be six feet above the trigger point.

“We don’t expect that to happen right now,” spokeswoman Rose Davis said, referring to possible cutbacks. “Right now the probability of a shortage for 2016 is negligible.”

Davis said the reservoir’s water level could again fall to record lows in the next six to eight weeks, but that it would rebound by the end of December.

Lake Mead supplies water to roughly 40 million people and agricultural customers in Nevada, Arizona, Southern California and northern Mexico.

The water source and several other man-made reservoirs springing from the Colorado River have dropped to as low as 45 per cent of their capacity as the river suffers a 14th straight year of crippling drought.

About 96 per cent of the water in Lake Mead is from melted snow that falls in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming, officials said.

Snowfall has dipped in the Rocky Mountains, leading to a drop in snow pack runoff that feeds the river, according to Bureau of Reclamation statistics. In 2013, runoff was at 47 per cent of normal.

“We’re all definitely concerned about the low levels of Lake Mead,” Davis said. “You have to be… this drought has extended for so long.”

She said water managers will continue to closely monitor its levels and work with those involved on various conservation efforts.

— David Schwartz reports for Reuters from Phoenix.

The post Reservoir formed by Hoover Dam dips to record low appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.

“Periods of record warmth in the West and not enough precipitation during the rainy season cut short drought relief in California this winter and prospects for above-average temperatures this spring may make the situation worse,” Jon Gottschalck, chief of the centre’s Operational Prediction Branch, said in issuing its spring outlook.

The centre, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also said rivers in western New York and eastern New England have the greatest risk of spring flooding in part because of heavy snowpack coupled with possible spring rain.

The western U.S. is expected to see the multi-year drought continue and intensify in 2015 and extend into the northern Plains, the outlook said.

Drought is forecast to persist in California, Nevada and Oregon through June with the onset of the dry season in April.

“I see nothing that would indicate much improvement, if any improvement, in the overall situation for field crops for 2015,” said Brad Rippey, meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, noting he expects to see a significant drop in field crops again this year in California.

“Drought is also forecast to develop in remaining areas of Oregon and western Washington. Drought is also likely to continue in parts of the southern Plains,” NOAA said.

But forecasters expect drought improvement in the Southwest, southern Rockies, southern Plains and Gulf Coast while drought is likely in the northern Plains, upper Mississippi Valley and western Great Lakes.

Above-average temperatures are favoured this spring across the Far West, northern Rockies and northern Plains eastward to include parts of the western Great Lakes, and for all of Alaska. Below-normal temperatures are most likely this spring for Texas and nearby areas of New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma, the outlook said.

In the U.S. Midwest crop belt, a lack of snowfall in the northern states will mean an early planting season and little to no flooding, Rippey said. In contrast, the southern crop belt is wet and has already seen minor to moderate flooding.

“I would expect planting to go a little better in the upper Midwest this spring than it will in the Ohio Valley,” Rippey added at the presentation of the outlook.

— Christine Stebbins is a Reuters correspondent covering agriculture and ag markets from Chicago.

The post No relief in sight for U.S. West’s drought in spring outlook appeared first on Canadian Cattlemen.