On a chilly December morning at Elephant Mountain Wildlife Management Area, some thirty miles south of the West Texas town of Alpine, a group of more than a hundred wildlife conservationists, researchers, and volunteers have gathered to capture the elusive bighorn sheep. A helicopter drones above the sheep’s high desert habitat before swooping down upon a herd of five to ten animals. They start to run, splintering off in twos and threes. A man leans out from the helicopter and fires a net launcher at a ram that has long, curved horns. The bighorn tangles in the web and tumbles, sustaining gashes and scrapes on the rocky terrain. His eyesight goes dark as another man, known as a mugger, blindfolds him. The animal’s legs are bound, yet he’s moving—upward. The ground falls away as the helicopter airlifts him out.
Once he meets the ground again, several pairs of hands carry him onto a table. He’s poked and prodded as he receives a medical workup: A finger in his anus. A nasal swab in his nostril. Stitches for his wounds. A bulky GPS collar fitted around his neck. And a sharp piercing sensation in his outer ear as he’s tagged with a number. At long last the blindfold is removed, and his legs are free again, but the only place to go is into a small, dim space, where a handful of other sheep wait. Time passes slowly in this dark box, which shakes and shudders until several hours later it stops. The sheep are set free—260 miles northwest of their home. Gone is the vast flat-topped summit of Elephant Mountain; instead, the animals find themselves on the rugged ridgeline of the Franklin Mountains, towering above El Paso.
If desert bighorn possessed the gift of language, perhaps they’d regale their lambs with tales of their abduction and unlikely survival. For Froylán Hernandez, who for thirteen years has led Texas Parks and Wildlife’s desert bighorn sheep program, the species’ survival was always part of the plan—though, in what might seem a paradox, one motivation for keeping bighorn alive in Texas is to boost the state’s hunting economy. But conserving these majestic, long-standing ruminants has proved more challenging than anticipated, as disease and an imported competitor threaten the native sheep’s existence.
By most measures, the desert bighorn sheep—one of at least three subspecies of bighorn in North America, and the only in Texas—is an extremely tough animal. Its ability to traverse a steep rock face would put the most expert human climber to shame. During the cooler seasons, it can go weeks without water and can stand to lose as much as 30 percent of its body weight. Its agile body and sharp eyesight allow it to nimbly evade predators, including mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, and eagles. Beholding the animal is like witnessing something ancient or otherworldly. Its namesake horns are inscribed with lines that, like the rings of a tree, reveal a ram’s age (bighorn may live as long as twenty years, though nine to fourteen is more typical). These same horns have made the species a popular trophy among hunters—a fact that once nearly led to its downfall, but now plays a role in rallying support and conservation funds for the species.
Before Anglo settlers arrived in what is today Texas in the early 1800s, as many as three thousand bighorn sheep roamed the West Texas high desert. But the new arrivals brought livestock, which carried pathogens to which the bighorn had no natural resistance. Disease, coupled with largely unregulated hunting, quickly decimated the existing population.
Though efforts to restore the animal to West Texas were already underway by the 1950s, largely in the form of propagation facilities, the herds by then were too small to proliferate. By the early 1960s, the native desert bighorn had been wiped out in the state. The first effective campaign to reestablish the desert bighorn sheep, backed by donations from big-game hunters, began with the formation of the Texas Bighorn Society in the 1980s. The organization raised $200,000 to create a brood pasture—land that would provide optimal habitat for lambs—in the Sierra Diablo mountains, about 130 miles southeast of El Paso. Advocates sourced bighorn sheep from Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico. In 1985, a rancher donated a 23,000-acre tract called Elephant Mountain, intended for desert bighorn propagation, to the state. The groundwork was laid with ample land for conserving bighorn; the next challenge would be moving them from these breeding sites to other parts of the species’ historic range.
As TPWD aspired to restore the native sheep to its historic habitat, the department began looking toward mountain ranges on private lands and contacted landowners who would be willing to act as stewards for the bighorn sheep. Before helicopters were used to capture bighorn sheep, conservationists would use drop nets—a labor-intensive process that required baiting an animal into a specific area over a period of time, usually through the use of food. The first capture that employed the use of helicopters, a method shepherded by conservationists in New Zealand , was in 2000, Hernandez recalled.
Around the time Hernandez took the helm of the state’s bighorn sheep program, in 2011, TPWD amped up its capture and release efforts, organizing these events every two or three years. On occasion, the agency brings bighorn to Texas from other states; more commonly, as in the event I witnessed, they move the creatures from parts of Texas with lots of bighorn to parts of the species’ historic range with fewer. Translocations are elaborate and expensive affairs, requiring an average of thirty participants to pull off and costing around $5,000 per captured animal. The event I witnessed, which amounted to 77 bighorn sheep, cost something close to a million dollars, Hernandez said. (That figure also includes the cost of future surveys and upkeep.)
By 2019, these efforts had successfully restored the bighorn population to around 1,500. The impressive comeback was (and still is) hailed as one of the greatest success stories in North American wildlife conservation. But that same year it suffered a major setback.
Just a few months before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a deadly outbreak of a bacterium called Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae (M.ovi) tore through West Texas’s bighorn sheep population. Commonly found in domestic sheep and goats, M.ovi has been around for decades. While the desert bighorn doesn’t have much opportunity to interact with domestic sheep in West Texas—that industry has largely died out in the region—it does interact with the aoudad, an exotic species originally from the Barbary Coast of Africa, whose population has exploded in Texas. While aoudad can carry M.ovi, the bacterium has few health consequences for them.
Meanwhile, the disease’s impact on the native sheep population has been catastrophic. Bighorn that contract M.ovi, which causes respiratory symptoms that often turn into pneumonia, rarely survive it. Within just five years, the population that TPWD and its partners had painstakingly restored fell by more than half.
Aoudad have also become fierce competitors for the bighorn sheep. Also called Barbary sheep, they were introduced from North Africa in the 1950s. The animals inhabit the same high desert landscape as bighorn, and they feed on the same desert shrubs and cacti. Their prevalence is arguably a problem of TPWD’s own making; the agency introduced the aoudad to Texas as a game species. The new arrivals thrived in numbers no one had envisioned. “I don’t think anybody thought it would become the problem that it has become,” Hernandez said. “Every mountain range that has bighorns on it has aoudad.” He estimated that as of 2018, there were close to 20,000, “possibly even 30,000,” aoudad in West Texas alone.
It’s a problem with no easy solution: Many landowners rely on aoudad hunts to get by as cattle ranching becomes increasingly unviable amid drought conditions. Hunters pay handsomely for the privilege of shooting aoudad on private land, often in lavish guided excursions. “Some [landowners] are making $60,000, others closer to $250,000 of additional income per year,” said Hernandez. Because the aoudad is classified as an “exotic” and not a “big-game” animal, it’s not regulated by TPWD; there are no bag limits on hunting, and it can be hunted year-round.
Hernandez told me a story about a landowner he knew who had to sell all his cattle after drought ravaged his land. Without aoudad hunting, he told Hernandez, his business would’ve gone under. “So I cannot in my right mind say to him, ‘Hey, get rid of all your aoudad.’ I can’t ask him to get rid of $50,000 to $60,000 of supplemental income a year that may keep him in operation.”
That hasn’t stopped some landowners from taking matters into their own hands. Allen Smith, whose family’s property in the Big Bend is a refuge for the desert bighorn, treats aoudad the same way he deals with the native sheep’s natural predator, the mountain lion: by shooting them on sight.“You could kill as many aoudad as have lambs and you’d still never get ahead of the curve,” he said. “We’ve allowed them to become so invasive that around Marathon, there are ranches that have several hundred aoudad moving at one time.”
Smith said he doesn’t begrudge landowners who keep aoudad on their land for hunting. “It’s a real cash cow for a lot of them,” he said, adding, “As a landowner you’ve got to make the decision which animal you want to support.”
At his office on Lado Ranch, south of Van Horn, Kai Buckert keeps a pile of a dozen or more bighorn heads and horns—to remind him not just of the lives lost when M.ovi devastated his herd, but also of the potential revenue they still represent. “I think about it every morning,” he told me.
Buckert is the general manager of Wexford Ranches, which comprises seven ranches in seven counties across Texas. Lado Ranch was one of the first to receive a herd of bighorns (from Nevada), in 1987, as restoration efforts amped up. By 2017, the business had more than a hundred head—enough to receive a couple of tags, or permits, from TPWD to hunt them each year (TPWD has a system for issuing bighorn tags based on the number of older rams in a herd). Buckert also runs mule deer and aoudad hunts on the property. But bighorn sheep carry an especially hefty price tag; hunters pay between $60,000 and $70,000 to hunt one of the animals on private land—money that returns to the landowner. Meanwhile, the permits that TPWD retains are often auctioned for as much as $175,000, the proceeds of which return to conservation efforts. In New Mexico, a state bighorn sheep tag recently sold for $1.3 million.
Then, in 2019, the die-off began, and his herd dwindled to fifteen — not a healthy enough number to harvest. How the animals contracted M.ovi disease is no mystery to Buckert. He’s seen aoudad and bighorn drinking out of the same water troughs. He told me that while they don’t crossbreed, the aoudad rams, which are bigger than the bighorn, will often keep bighorn ewes within their harems during mating season. Without the bighorn permits, Buckert said, he’s made up about 60 percent of that potential revenue through aoudad hunts.
The effort to keep a game species alive is often funded, in large part, by the same people who want to shoot it for sport. “When you look at the management and conservation of species in this amazing state that we live in,” said Corey Mason, the chief operating officer and vice president of the Wild Sheep Foundation, a Montana-based organization dedicated to the conservation of native sheep, “sixty to seventy percent [of revenue dedicated to conservation] come on the backs of sportsmen and sportswomen.” That includes a federal excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment that redistributes the money proportionately to states, commensurate with license sales and participation. This tax alone represented more than $1 billion returned to fish and game agencies nationwide in 2023. The bulk of funding for TPWD’s bighorn sheep restoration efforts comes from donations through entities like the Texas Bighorn Society and those federal dollars.
But those same incentives have presented a catch-22 where the desert bighorn is concerned: One of the biggest threats to the native sheep’s existence is an animal that has proliferated in large part because it’s valuable to the state’s hunting economy.
Last December, TPWD, in partnership with the Texas Bighorn Society, organized the first desert bighorn capture and relocation in five years. This one would take place at Elephant Mountain and would be unlike any capture that had come before—for one thing, the organizations would quarantine the animals for 24 hours and test them for M.ovi. And then there was the tricky matter of choosing a release site: “If you told me five or ten years ago that we were going to the Franklins,” Hernandez said, “I would say that you were crazy.”
Hernandez and his colleagues chose Franklin Mountains State Park, in El Paso, largely because it’s aoudad-free. And the park is surrounded by a city, a factor that would ordinarily have been a deterrent and now was a draw. “One of the things that we look for in a restoration site is the potential for natural expansion,” said Hernandez. However, with the specter of disease still looming, they needed to find a disease-free environment that would eliminate the possibility of it spreading. With few predators around for the bighorn, the population would function as a little island; in the best-case scenario, the bighorn would flourish there. “I’ve been knocking on wood here quite a bit for the last six months,” Hernandez said, laughing.
Of course there were concerns: Proximity to a city meant there would likely be more interactions with people, and the desert bighorn were notoriously skittish, which meant they might flee to parts of the mountains less suitable for their survival. Plus, there was the concern of traffic collisions, as occasional vehicle incidents with mule deer have been recorded on highways near the Franklins. Yet Hernandez is confident the animals will habituate well after a couple of years.
Back at Elephant Mountain, as a helicopter droned nearer, throwing sheets of dust in the air, two bighorn sheep gently descended from the sky in their gunnysacks, blindfolded and soundless. The volunteers ran their stations; the veterinarians readied their sutures; a ram kicked loudly against the side of the metal trailer where it was being held.
What is to be done about the aoudad issue? “That’s the million-dollar question,” said Hernandez, and it would have to wait another day.
