Jill Replogle covers Orange County.
Local and national news, NPR, things to do, food recommendations and guides to Los Angeles, Orange County and the Inland EmpireLAist is part of Southern California Public Radio, a member-supported public media network. For the latest national news from NPR and our live radio broadcast, visitMating season for bighorn sheep takes place in the fall. Rams compete to mate with the females, including by slamming their heads together.
"It's frustrating," Stephenson said."I've spent a lot of my career trying to get this animal to recovery. And when you think you have it figured out, you'll get a curveball thrown at you like a winter as extreme as the one we just had." The bighorn recovery team also does winter and summer surveys of the areas occupied by the 14 bighorn herds they monitor, but some sheep territory is difficult to access. Researchers say it’s possible some sheep in the hardest-hit herds survived and simply couldn't be found."I don't want to let go of this idea that there still might be sheep out there," said Sarah Stock, a Yosemite National Park wildlife ecologist, referring to the decimated Cathedral Range herd.
Since then, state and federal wildlife officials have tried to carefully manage the herds. They’ve transported ewes and rams from healthy herds to augment smaller ones, and started new herds in other parts of the sheep's historic range. Stephenson said the Sierra Nevada had likely experienced storms of similar intensity at some point in history, and the bighorn species persisted. But because the population is now so small, it's difficult to sustain major losses.
"Those historic migration patterns would have given them many more opportunities to move to lower elevations where they would be much less impacted by these severe winters," Stephenson said. Mating season for bighorn sheep takes place in the fall. Rams compete to mate with the females, including by slamming their heads together.The hope, Stephenson said, was that moving the lions to a mountain range in the Mojave National Preserve — with a large stretch of desert between them and the Sierra Nevada — would prevent the lions from trying to return.
When the Sierra bighorns were listed as endangered, mountain lions were recognized as a major threat to their recovery. In the early years of the recovery program, mountain lions known to target bighorn sheep were regularly euthanized — sometimes several of them each year, he said. "We know that wolves preyed on mountain lions," Stock said."So our predator-prey system is kind of out of whack. And that could be part of the issue that we're seeing play out right now."The upside of all that winter precipitation was plentiful summer forage for the surviving sheep and their new lambs. LAist joined researchers on a recent hike to look for bighorn on the backside of Wheeler Ridge, northwest of Bishop.
Dogs can scare away bighorns so it's best to leave them at home or keep them on a leash in bighorn territory. Some areas where bighorn sheep live prohibit pets so please follow the local rules.
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