Translocations and Artificial Stocking

Transcript for Moving Bighorn Sheep

Speaker: As the sunlight begins to pierce the early-morning sky over Canyon Lake, a small militia of wildlife biologists, handlers, and pilots prepares to capture and relocate 30 desert bighorn sheep.

Kriselle Colvin, Arizona Game & Fish: Today, we’re capturing sheep as part of a transplant effort to move sheep from these healthy sheep populations in units 22 and 24B to 37B, in the Mineral Mountain range, where we’ve been doing a transplant operation since 2003 to get a viable population in that mountain range.

Speaker: Bighorn sheep live and thrive on rocky canyon slopes. They can easily scale the side of a mountain in places where you or I couldn’t get a toehold. So, the only practical way to safely capture them is with a net gun from a helicopter.

Kriselle Colvin: The helicopter goes up and locates a herd of sheep, and the net gunner kind of sits on the edge of the seat, hangs out the side a little bit. And they try to get one of the sheep out and away from the herd enough to fire the net gun. And that net should go out and kind of tangle up that sheep. And then they’ll drop down low enough that the third member of the crew can exit the helicopter, run around, and get on that sheep—secure the sheep.

Speaker: The net gunning process has a lot of moving parts. In this operation, the helicopters are flying low and slow over steep, rugged terrain. Since safety is always the number-one priority, the experience of the crews is critical.

Larry Phoenix, Arizona Game & Fish: We work really closely with our pilot, and the net gunners we have in the department have actually net gunned for quite a while. And the pilots that we use are very experienced, as well. And so, we work pretty good together without even communicating a lot verbally.

I can tell by the way he’s flying the ship, where he’s going to go. And he can tell by the way the animals are running where I’m going to make my shot because we’ve both done it for such a long time.

You’ll see in some of the videos, potentially, that we’ll be chasing animals for what seems like a long time, but what we’re actually trying to do is single out a specific animal. When you net an animal, you have to be really careful because the nets are 10 by 10 or 12 by 12 squares but on each corner is a pretty heavy weight. And you want to be careful so this weight doesn't hit one of the other animals in the herd.

Once we see that the animal is caught up in the net, and what we think is not going to get away—because every once in a while, they just roll out of the net and off they go—we actually have a third person in the helicopter who we call the mugger.

Speaker: The mugger’s first goal is to subdue the animal by getting it down on the ground and covering its eyes with a blindfold. Once the sheep can’t see what’s going on around it, they generally calm down.

Sometimes though, even a blindfold doesn’t subdue the sheep completely. These animals have such a strong flight instinct that the mugger might occasionally be taken for a short ride—in this case, right through a patch of cholla cactus.

But generally, the captures go very smoothly. So once the sheep is hobbled, it’s ready for transport. If there’s a safe place to land near the capture site, the sheep is loaded directly into the helicopter. If the pilot can’t land in a suitable location, then the sheep is placed in a specially designed bag and tethered underneath the helicopter for the short flight to the staging area.

This staging area is set up in the parking lot next to Canyon Lake. Here, dozens of Game and Fish personnel and volunteers take over the handling of the sheep. In this carefully orchestrated process, the sheep is untangled from the net, then the wildlife health team begins tending to any injuries that may have occurred during the capture process.

Anne Justice-Allen, Arizona Game & Fish: The other thing we’re doing is we’re collecting biological samples such as blood, and we’re going to test for antibodies to diseases that bighorn sheep get, especially the pneumonia diseases. The other thing we’re doing is we’re collecting swab from the nasal passages, and we’re going to save those back and culture them if it looks like any of the antibody tests are positive. The sheep are coming in nice and cool, and they look very healthy. They’re looking really great.

Speaker: After the test samples have been collected, the sheep are given some immunizations and vitamins, and they each receive an ear tag for identification. Ten of these sheep will receive real-time GPS tracking collars so the biologists can monitor the sheep’s comings and goings on a daily basis. While all of this is going on, another group untangles and repacks the nets so the helicopter crews can keep moving.

Kriselle Colvin: We wouldn’t have been able to do this without a lot of help from the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society. And they’ve put in a lot of volunteer man-hours and funding to help us with these new relocation projects, and get us the collars—the tracking collars. And we’ve just this year gotten data that’s showing that this project is really taking hold and working. It’s one of those things that, for a while, you hope and you hope and you hope, and then, this year, we finally saw that data that these sheep are really taking hold.

Male Speaker: OK, drop.

Speaker: Once the sheep are processed, they’re placed in travel boxes for the last leg of their journey—this time to the Mineral Mountains, near Florence. This location was identified in 2000 by Arizona Game and Fish as prime sheep habitat, and this is the third translocation of bighorn into the area.

Kriselle Colvin: It’s important to re-establish these populations. The sheep, in and of themselves, have an intrinsic value. They’re an important animal to our ecosystem. They’re an animal that creates a lot of attention. They’re very charismatic. People really enjoy seeing them. I have a lot of recreationists in my district. I hear about all the time how they got to see these sheep when they were in Box Canyon or wherever. And they just love that.

This will be the last transplant for this project. It’ll mean we’ve moved 90—or, actually, a 100 sheep. And I think this last transplant is going to help kick them up that extra notch, where they’re going to be healthy and out there for generations to come. It’s been really exciting for me to get in at pretty close to the beginning of it and see it really start to take hold. So I'm excited about that.