A helicopter whips along the sheer face of Elephant Mountain, a mesa rising 2,000 feet above the West Texas desert, as its pilot scans the cliffside for desert bighorn sheep. The stockily built animals weigh between 150 and 300 pounds and show surprising agility as they use their powerful hind legs to hurl themselves across these steep, rocky slopes.

It doesn't take long for the pilot to spy the mighty curved horns for which the bighorn earns its name. He descends, the aircraft hovering mere feet above the ground. Then the chase begins. Once the pilot has zeroed in on a target, the clock starts ticking: they have only two minutes to capture the sheep to prevent it from overexertion. Like dogs, bighorn sheep must pant to cool themselves down and are prone to overheat during the stressful capture experience — even on a frigid December morning like this.

Inside the helicopter, one person, the gunner, leans out from the cockpit, takes aim and shoots, sending a weighted net hurtling through the air. The net meets its target, shrouding the animal and bringing it to a halt. The chopper lands and a third person, the mugger, leaps from the cockpit to blindfold the sheep and secure it in a full-body harness.

The team returns to operation headquarters with two bighorns in tow, dangling from the base of the aircraft like dice from a rearview mirror. The helicopter gently lowers them to the ground, where a team of wildlife biologists, veterinarians, students and volunteers is waiting to quickly test, tag and collar the animals before moving them to trailers.

“You've got a big ol' metal mosquito on top of you, firing nets upon you, so it's almost like alien abduction,” says Froylán Hernández, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's desert bighorn sheep program leader, describing the first part of the bighorn translocation experience.

The early December capture at Elephant Mountain Wildlife Management Area was part of a decades-spanning effort carried out by hundreds of wildlife experts to reintroduce desert bighorn sheep to the mountains of West Texas. These sheep were bound for Franklin Mountains State Park in the center of metropolitan El Paso, 250 miles to the west of their current home and safe from threats the species faces in other parts of the state.

According to Franklin Mountains Superintendent Cesar Mendez, park staff has spent years preparing for their arrival through habitat restoration and the placement of water guzzlers to accommodate for a lack of year-round water sources.

Bighorns in Texas

For more than a century, most of the mountains of far West Texas have been missing their native desert bighorn sheep, one of about half a dozen subspecies of North America's fabled bighorns. Two hundred years ago, you could point at random to a mountain range on the West Texas horizon and be certain that bighorns occupied its rocky faces. In the mid-1800s, they numbered more than 2,500 in Texas. As the railroad blazed its way further into the desert, it brought threats such as unregulated hunting and domesticated sheep carrying transferrable diseases. In 1903, the Texas Legislature banned the hunting of bighorns to curb their rapid decline. Despite this and efforts to establish conservation areas for them, their numbers continued to plummet. In 1958, the last known native desert bighorn was spotted at Sierra Diablo Wildlife Management Area, north of Van Horn. By the 1960s, bighorns had been eradicated from the Lone Star State. Although bighorns are found in abundance throughout the western states, they struggled to regain a foothold in Texas.

In the latter half of the 20th century, TPWD and the Texas Bighorn Society began a propagation program and slowly made inroads to reintroducing bighorns to West Texas. But reintroduction has proved to be an uphill battle. Nine of the current 10 Texas herds of desert bighorns carry the bacteria Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae, or M. ovi for short. Although somewhat benign in other species of domestic sheep, M. ovi causes deadly pneumonia in bighorns. Texas populations of invasive aoudads, also known as Barbary sheep, have exacerbated the problem. This introduced species from North Africa greatly outnumbers bighorn sheep in Texas, with population estimates upwards of 20,000. They've grown so rampant that biologists and game wardens say that in West Texas there might be more aoudad than feral hogs, another widespread and problematic invasive species. Not only do the aoudads compete with bighorn for resources, but they have proven to be vectors for M. ovi and have potentially spread the disease to bighorns. And it looks as though aoudads are here to stay. They're well-adapted to the arid terrain of West Texas. And while some landowners recognize their negative impact to both native species conservation and agriculture, they have market incentive to keep them around: a single aoudad hunt can fetch $7,000 for a private landowner.

Despite 50 years of efforts to develop a vaccine to guard against M. ovi, scientists haven't been able to create one that's effective against constantly changing strains of the bacteria in a free-range setting. Medicated feed has proved challenging due to difficulties providing appropriate, timed dosages to the free-range population. The bighorn population bounced back to nearly 1,500 in the 2010s only to be struck by several disease events in the last few years. The current tally of desert bighorns in Texas is only about 700.

Elephant Mountain is the exception as the only so-called “clean herd” in Texas, meaning that there is no trace of M. ovi. That's no accident. Thus far, TPWD staff have kept aoudad off the wildlife management area with a combination of 13 game cameras stationed across the property to watch for aoudad intruders and biweekly aerial gunning. Keeping the aoudads at bay is most likely an unsustainable practice.

“It's not ‘if’ the aoudad are going to bring M. ovi to the mountain, but ’when,‘” says Cody McEntire, Elephant Mountain's wildlife biologist. Elephant Mountain has served as the source population for bighorn reintroductions to several Texas ranges, with more than 400 sheep captured and translocated from the resident herd since 2000. With the average lifespan of a wild desert bighorn ranging from 10 to 15 years, several generations of sheep have passed since their ancestors, 10 rams and 10 ewes, were first brought to Elephant Mountain on Feb. 4, 1987. Their descendants, the 212 bighorns living at Elephant Mountain as of early December 2024, represent the best hope for species re-eastablishment across West Texas.

A Secure New Home

With the relocation, Hernández hopes to accomplish two goals — bringing Elephant Mountain's population back down to a target population of 100-120 while planting the seeds for a new, clean herd at El Paso's Franklin Mountains State Park. The 26,000-acre property ranks among the largest urban parks in the country. For decades, it was disregarded as a potential site for bighorn reintroduction because it is bordered by highways and houses on three sides. But what conservationists once saw as a flaw became the property's biggest asset as they sought a secure and aoudad-free home for bighorns. The Franklin Mountains provide a virtual quarantine zone for the animals.

The new herd holds significance beyond state lines as well. According to Hernández, it will be one of only a handful of disease-free bighorn herds in the United States.

“It's important that we continue our restoration efforts; it was because of us that desert bighorns are no longer here,” Hernández says.

In the late 1950s, the agency that later became TPWD introduced what is now the bighorn's primary threat. The Texas Game and Fish Commission released 42 aoudads into Palo Duro Canyon to study their viability in the Lone Star State and ultimately provide more hunting opportunities for private ranchers. Over the following 10 years, the aoudad population grew to 600, and quickly spread beyond the confines of the park and onto private land where they became harder to track. “It's our collective responsibility to make sure that we get the environment as close to as it once was as we can,” he adds.

Samples collected from the bighorns captured on Dec. 3 were flown via chartered jet from the Alpine Municipal Airport to the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab in Pullman, Washington. There, lab technicians tested the samples for M. ovi. Results came in 24 hours later, as the bighorns were en route to the Franklin Mountains. “The test results are in,” Hernández said over the radio to the six drivers transporting the sheep. “We're all negative.”

Homecoming

A ram with curling horns pauses inside the trailer, uncertain about leaving the protection of its metal walls, before bolting into the unknown mountains to join his new herd.

It is the last of 77 bighorn sheep released into the Franklin Mountains State Park on Dec. 4. As the sun sets over the Chihuahuan Desert, 600 spectators watch as the newly relocated bighorns leap over yucca, candelilla and cacti to disappear behind the closest peak.

“The El Paso community has already adopted the bighorn sheep,” said Mendez, the Franklin Mountains superintendent. “Now that the sheep are here we'll take good care of them.”

For lifelong El Pasoans Manuel Elenes, 65, and his mother, 95-year-old Beatrice Elenes, it was cathartic to see the park reclaim its keystone species.

“She's lucky to see this in her lifetime,” Manuel Elenes says of his mother. “They've been gone since before she was born.”

For the bighorns, the release is the last stop on the epic journey they'd endured in the preceding 36 hours, with capture, transport and, now, release.

The relocation marks another step to restore our state's bighorn population, and brings new hope for the future.

“Over 80 percent of the ewes were pregnant, so we're hoping that the vast majority of those lamb here,” Hernández says. “I'm hoping that in three to five years, we'll have an established population, and possibly evenincreasing. From there, we'll do what we did at Elephant: identify surplus, capture the animals and then continue the restoration of another mountain range.”

Hernández estimates that the Franklin Mountains can hold between 250 and 300 desert bighorns. But for now, he's keeping his hopes low as the sheep fight to establish themselves in their new home. As they do their job, work will continue for the many bighorn conservationists as well.

“It's a great feeling — the capture operation, the transplant, the release. That's done, so we get to breathe,” Hernández said. “But the job is not done. In fact, now the job really begins. We have to ensure the bighorns stay here, they thrive here, that the population grows and that we continue restoration efforts. This is just one piece of a very, very big puzzle.”

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