Bringing Back the Bighorns

They talk of the trap. The men crowd around the table on the blue and white houseboat. The refrigeration unit hums and wars against the July heat steaming Lake Mead. Art Fuller, game specialist for the Arizona Game and Fish Department's Kingman region, draws the plan on a sheet of paper.

He first sketches the net; then he explains where the men must position themselves. He advises that knives and clippers can be used. "And," he continues, "then we'll start peeling them out. Now keep the heads and backs under the net. George'll sex 'em and age 'em."

The arsenal includes 24 ear tags, four radio collars. For 60 days the plan has been in motion. Now is the time to make the move. The men lean back and sip from cans of cola. Tomorrow they are going to trap, wrestle, hobble, blindfold, tag, tote, and relocate desert bighorn sheep. This is serious business; the men listen up.

Once people in Arizona talked of the end of the game. The 1884 report by J. H. Taggart of the newly formed Arizona Fish Commission noted sadly: "Such wild game as we have, must soon be protected or it will be annihilated; already our beautiful and gamey quail have been almost driven away from the more populous localities; the deer are yearly harder to find; and so through the list."

Now everyone knows better. The game is not yet finished.

The sheep were like gods. Early hunters left their thoughts about them pecked into the rock walls of the Southwest. A 36-square-mile area in California's Mohave desert has more than 7000 rock drawings of bighorn sheep. Killing sheep was never easy. Stone Age men hid behind stone blinds; they fashioned rock-walled traps that spilled into corrals. Their hands created dozens of rock heaps to look like hunters, and these stone frauds spooked the sheep toward anxious men waiting with atlatls. [See sketch, page 41.] Coronado's men glimpsed sheep on their march north. James Ohio Pattie, in December, 1824, found them near what is now Clifton and Morenci in eastern Arizona. He saw "multitudes of mountain sheep. These animals are not found on the level ground...but on these cliffs and rocks they are so nimble and expert in jumping from point to point that no dog or wolf can overtake them.... Their meat tastes like our mutton...."

The bands of bighorns disappeared with the expansion of cattle herds in the late 19th century. Livestock devoured the range and introduced new diseases. For 40 years after statehood the sheep were not even hunted, and today perhaps 3500 cling to less than one-fourth of their former range.

The experience of the bighorns is typi-cal of Arizona game animals. Once they Were many; then they were few. And now they are back.

European and American travelers often found Arizona to be an unhappy hunting ground. Kit Carson is said to have remarked that he never knew of a trapping party to return from the Gila River country except in starving condition. Although early explorers encountered abundant mule deer and pronghorn antelope in northcentral Arizona, they struggled to take them down. The Whipple expedition of the 1850s failed to bag even one bighorn for a scientific specimen. Many who ventured into the region wound up eating their own horses and mules.

With settlement, the beasts, difficult to hunt, became difficult to find.

Pronghorn melted away with the proliferation of homesteads, domestic sheep, fences, and roads. A natural recovery began in the '20s and departmental transplants in the '40s enhanced this comeback. Today, they number about 7500.

Merriam's elk vanished at the end of the 19th century. The Winslow Elks Lodge imported 86 from Wyoming in 1913; in 1928 more were released. Today, the Yellowstone variety of elk has boomed, with 1600 animals a year being harvested by hunters. There are more elk in Arizona today than when the area was first settled by Americans, according to expert estimates.

Javelina were hunted hard, then for a part of the '30s, protected by law. Today, there are more present than in pre-settlement times. Mule deer have also flourished in this century. Black bears may be more numerous now than 100 years ago.

The last Arizona grizzly bear was killed in 1935; the wolf is extinct. Gone from Arizona, jaguar persist in neighboring Mexico.

The basic pattern in America is settlement destroying habitat for wildlife. Where Arizona proved exceptional was in its enormous and varied reserve of public land. The state had a place where the game could find ground for a return. The Arizona Game and Fish Department helped produce this recovery.

The afternoon lake wears a glass surface as the boat slips easily across to Sidewinder Cove. For two months, Chris Mendoza, a Northern Arizona University student working with the department as an intern, has been baiting the sheep with a 160-pound daily hit of apple mash. Sometimes the mix seems to ferment a little, and the men from Game and Fish

Bighorn Sheep

joke that the biggest stress on the sheep is going to be detoxification.

Live trapping was perfected in Nevada. The sheep are fed, conditioned to come to bait, and then, one day the net falls and they are caught. Blasting caps in the cord tying off the net are ignited for the drop. Previously, the department chased sheep in helicopters and shot tranquilizing darts into them. This technique, while successful, has some drawbacks: some sheep died, flying the canyons was dangerous, and the take was maybe six or eight bighorns a day.

Now two ewes stand under the net in Sidewinder Cove; a dozen or more big rams and ewes and lambs watch from nearby rock walls. Fuller tightens the corners of the trap and surveys the sheep. Thirty to 40 have been coming regularly into the bait, and he sizes them up as candidates. “I want the smartest ewes that are possible,” he explains. “The ones that are wary.” The cove slices into the Black Mountains which harbor perhaps 800 sheep throughout the range. The day before six sheep grazed within 50 yards of the highway, only two miles from Hoover Dam. The Game and Fish people figure the herd is triple the normal carrying capacity for the land. Eventually, a bad year will crush the bighorns. Arizona has mountains empty of sheep. The bighorns of Sidewinder Cove are going back to reclaim this ground. And the journey begins tomorrow.

Home was the Grand Wash Cliffs. They would wander the country north of the Grand Canyon foraging in chasms named Burnt Springs, Tincanebitts, Whitmore, Andrus, Twin Springs, Pearce. This is the Arizona Strip, a vast, empty empire of plateau and canyon north of the Colorado River.

Domestic sheep claimed the area in the early 1900s. The bighorns vanished. By the 1950s, aerial surveys could turn up only a few animals. In 1974, domestic sheep were eliminated from this range and the department began to reconsider the enormous piece of land as bighorn country. Transplants reclaimed the Virgin Mountains near the Nevada and Utah lines. Now the time had come to take back the Grand Wash Cliffs. When conservationist Aldo Leopold was an old man, he wrote, “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.” He was perhaps this century’s best thinker about wild animals and wild places. He learned his lessons in Arizona, where he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in his teens. By In 1933 he had written the book on game management (Game Management, 1933). The Arizona he first found was barely coming to grips with its wild empire. The first state agency dealing with game, the Arizona Fish Commission of 1881, devoted its early energies to importing carp as a promising sport fish. By 1887, the Commission expanded to regulate all wildlife. The first hunting and fishing license came in 1905 ($10 for non-residents) and finally, in 1912, a fifty-cent license was demanded of residents.

The legislature regulated hunting and fishing until 1929 when the Arizona

Locator map. 1. Sidewinder Cove, Lake Mead. 2. Virgin Mountains. 3. Grand Wash Cliffs. 4. Kaibab Plateau. 5. Black Mountains. 6. Merriam elk transplant site, 1913 and 1928.

Game and Fish Commission was created. As politicians cleared out of wildlife management, scientists poured in. The federal Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 provided funds for research on a state level; the Dingell-Johnson act of the late '40s financed fisheries.

Initially, the department fixed on two notions: game animals needed refuges; and predators should be eliminated. Leopold pushed both theories. By 1936, 80 refuges provided sanctuaries from the hunt where game could theoretically recoup, flourish, and repopulate outlying areas. The refuges failed; the game did just as well outside them.

In 1929, the department spent $1045 for the killing of 58 predators. The idea was that fewer wolves, coyotes, and lions meant more deer, elk, and antelope. This belief fell by the wayside over the decades, as it became apparent predators were part of the natural system.

Leopold lived through this change. In the beginning, he favored killing the wolf; he favored killing the bear. As for elk, he wrote, “we want no more elk” because he felt they competed with the deer. But the elk came back and thrived. There was much to learn about the needs of wild beasts, and Leopold took note. The man who yearned for the howl of a wolf in his old age, remembered the Arizona experience from his youth: “When our rifles were empty the old wolf was down....

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and the mountain. I was young and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view....” Leopold learned that deer without wolves could eat the mountain to the ground. Or, as he put it, “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” Everything was tangled together. A thing could look simple, as immutable as bighorn sheep living on cliffs and mountainsides. And yet the thing could prove frail. Arizona was the place where some of the hard lessons were learned. In places like the Kaibab, or the Blue River country along the New Mexico line, or on the uplifted stone spine called the Mogollon Rim. All these lessons reached into strange places, into isolated ground like the rock walled canyon of Sidewinder Cove.

Sun brushes the peak, the gray light fades. One hundred and sixty pounds of apple mash waits under the trap; five ewes approach the bait. Chris Mendoza, the man who has fed these sheep for 60 days, checks the corner of the net and then hunkers down nearby. The bighorns accept his presence at their 61st breakfast on the house.

By 6:38 A.M. 12 sheep have entered the trap. Mendoza kneels within six feet of a feeding sheep. The division between the hunter and the hunted breaks down in Sidewinder Cove. Everyone talks excitedly. Thirty sheep now crowd the canyon floor, gray and brown forms moving silently