A leader of the small, armed group of people occupying a remote national wildlife preserve in Oregon said Tuesday they will go home when a plan is in place to turn over management of federal lands to locals.
Rancher Bill Edwards is fighting an enemy that threatens to overrun his Flint Hills pastures, robbing his cattle of nutritious grasses and leaving the meadowlarks, box turtles, bobwhite quail and other wildlife in the same native prairies without suitable habitat.
The vast majority of the 1.6 million acres — nearly 2,600 square miles — that burned in Oregon, Idaho and Washington this year are federally owned, data show, with large swaths of that public land used as rangeland for livestock grazing.
