Back in the 1990’s I had the privilege of participating in a Bighorn relocation project where we released 27 Sierra Nevada Bighorns back into Yosemite National Park, where Bighorns had disappeared from more than 100 years earlier.
It was a big project where we had to purchase the grazing rights on winter range adjacent to the park and get all the domestic sheep removed so that pneumonia wouldn’t be transmitted to the Bighorns and wipe them out. We got all that done and did the capture the following March on winter grounds east of Kings Canyon National Park. We caught a total of 34 Bighorns and it was a big deal because of the historical significance for Yosemite. All 3 major networks and CNN had coverage of our project on the evening news.
We released 7 collared sheep south of the park, where we hoped they’d integrate with a small population Fish & Game didn’t know much about and the collars would allow them to study that small population of sheep. We released the other 27 sheep up Lee Vining Canyon at the eastern boundary of Yosemite. It was great watching those ewes, lambs and rams run from the trailers into freedom where there had been no sheep for so long.
I got a call from the biologist in charge of the project about 3-4 weeks after we’d released the sheep. He informed me that houndsmen associated with Animal Damage Control had been dispatched to remove mountain lions from the area as 8 or 9 of the sheep we’d released had already been killed by lions. In the end, we lost most of those sheep to depredations, mostly by lions.
