A ram with curling horns paused inside the trailer, uncertain about leaving the protection of its metal walls, before bolting into the unknown mountains to join his kin.
It was the last of 77 bighorn sheep released into the El Paso's Franklin Mountains State Park on Wednesday, December 4. As the sun set over the Chihuahuan Desert, 400 spectators watched as the newly relocated bighorns leapt over yucca, candelilla and cacti to disappear behind the closest peak.
Photo by Sonja Sommerfeld
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.”
Photo by Sonja Sommerfeld
For the bighorns, the release was the last stop on epic journey they'd endured in the preceding 36 hours. They'd been chased from above by a helicopter, captured in nets, hoisted into the air, tagged and tested by scientists and sequestered into trailers before traveling 250 miles from their home at Elephant Mountain Wildlife Management Area near Alpine to the middle of El Paso.
“You've got a big ol' metal mosquito on top of you, firing nets upon you, so it's almost like an alien abduction,” says Froylán Hernández, Texas Parks and Widlife Department's desert bighorn sheep program leader, in describing the bighorn experience.
For Hernández, Franklin Mountains Superintendent Cesar Mendez and the hundreds of others involved in the restoration effort, the release was the culmination of many decades of work.
The desert bighorn sheep is a Texas native. In recent decades it has struggled to retain a foothold among the mountain ranges of West Texas. It wasn't always this way. Bighorn sheep once numbered more than 2,500 in the Lone Star State. As the railroad blazed its way further into the desert, it brought threats such as unregulated hunting and domesticated sheep carrying transferrable diseases. Hunting bighorn was banned by the Texas Legislature in 1903, but in spite of this and other efforts to establish conservation areas for the sheep, their numbers continued to decline. In 1958, the last known native desert bighorn was spotted north of Van Horn. By the 1960s, the sheep had been eradicated from the Lone Star State.
In the latter half of the 20th century, TPWD and the Texas Bighorn Society began a captive breeding program and have slowly made inroads to reintroducing the sheep to the mountain ranges of West Texas. The current tally of bighorns is less than 1,000 across several Texas mountain ranges.
Elephant Mountain has served as the source population for reintroductions to several Texas ranges. With the average lifespan of a wild desert bighorn ranging from 10 to 20 years, several generations of sheep have passed since their ancestors, 10 rams and 10 ewes, were first brought to Elephant Mountain on February 4, 1987. Those initial pioneers have increased their population tenfold in the past three decades, bringing the population to its latest count of 212.
But reintroduction has proven to be an uphill battle. Most Texas herds of desert bighorns carry the bacteria Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae, M. ovi for short, which causes a deadly pneumonia in the bighorn population. Exacerbating the problem is the presence of aoudad, also known as Barbary sheep, an introduced species from Africa that greatly outnumbers bighorn sheep, with a Texas population estimate upwards of 20,000. Aoudad have proven to be vectors for M. ovi and are in close contact with bighorns in the steep terrain of West Texas. Bighorn populations have suffered several disease events in the last few years, reducing their numbers.
Elephant Mountain is an 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.
With the Franklin Mountains relocation, Hernández hopes to accomplish two goals — bringing the Elephant Mountain's population back down to its carrying capacity of 160 while planting the seeds for a new clean herd at the 26,000-acre state park in El Paso. This site was chosen for reintroduction because of its secure location. Bordered by the Rio Grande, highways and houses on three sides, Franklin Mountains State Park provides a virtual quarantine zone for the animals.
The relocation also marks another step to restore our state's bighorn population.
“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 even increasing. From there, do what we did at Elephant: identify surplus, capture the animals and then continue the restoration of another mountain range.”
As the bighorns fight to establish themselves in a new home, 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 says. “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.”