Interesting story on bighorn sheep and domestic sheep, Fish and Wildlife keep from mingling Wyoming

[Beringia]

https://www.wyofile.com/bighorns-bears-and-bad-blood-grazing-v-wildlife-on-owl-creek/

On Sept. 22, veteran Wyoming Game and Fish Biologist Bart Kroger climbed into a helicopter for an unwanted mission — to shoot eight wild bighorn rams from the air.

About two weeks earlier Kroger had spotted the small segment of the herd from the air on Bureau of Land Management property. He had searched them out after hearing that domestic sheep had moved up the Owl Creek drainage and into bighorn territory.

His worry, and the worry of other wildlife managers, was that the two species might mingle and exchange germs. Some bacteria carried by and harmless to domestic sheep can cause pneumonia in their wild cousins and decimate a herd.

The eight rams Kroger was seeking that September day were the most likely to have wandered over open country to investigate their domestic neighbors. Game and Fish, in a decision that Kroger said went “all the way up to our director,” decided to kill the rams.

“The risk [of disease] was big enough that we needed to take action,” Kroger told WyoFile. “The need to take out eight rams for the good of the entire herd is what it came down to. Aerial gunning turned out to be the easiest way.”

In his nearly 30 years with Game and Fish Department, Kroger’s never heard of an order for such a large bloodletting, he said. On that September morning, Kroger, who would be the operation’s spotter, took off with a pilot and marksman. They flew for two hours.

“Unfortunately, we could not find those eight rams,” he said. “So, we ceased the operation.”


Tobbins’ Hay Creek Land and Cattle Co. LLC operates on private and public land that stretches from lowlands into the mountains.

The holdings comprise a patchwork of unfenced private property intermingled with public lands, according to maps and descriptions provided by involved parties.


More domestic sheep on the way

According to an official BLM account, “grazing activity on the allotments ceased around 2005 due to litigation with the permits being officially canceled in 2007.” Robbins sought to regain the permits. Claiming that the grazing permits were too slow in coming, he wrote the BLM in 2012 that he would run domestic sheep on his property.

Hay Creek Land and Cattle incorporated domestic sheep into its operations beginning in 2013, according to a document Robbins signed with the Wild Sheep Foundation. Despite differences, the wild sheep group has worked with the Robbins operation and others to find solutions that would satisfy all, Kilpatrick told WyoFile.

An agreement signed in 2016 called on the wild sheep group to pay $14,000 for water infrastructure for the stock in the Blondy Pass pasture — a place separated from the bighorns. At that point the Hay Creek sheep herd had swollen to 1,500 head, Kilpatrick wrote — triple the initial stocking of 500. The additional water, funded by the conservations, was intended to accommodate the domestic sheep in a safe area and “prevent/minimize comingling…” with wild sheep. (See document below.)

In return, Robbins agreed to restrict sheep grazing to that pasture, according to the agreement. The document said the ranch company would work with Game and Fish on a grazing plan and the wildlife-stock mingling issues if the ranch needed to move its sheep closer to the bighorns.

But the agreement was only valid for one year. Efforts to strike a longer-term compromise went nowhere, Kilpatrick said. The domestic sheep herd has since grown larger.

A couple of weeks after the Game and Fish vote, wild sheep advocate Kilpatrick got news from Longwell that more sheep were on the way, Kilpatrick said. “In early August 2019 I was informed by Josh Longwell that they have increased their domestic sheep herd to 3,500 and they intended to move a portion of the herd “up county” — i.e. closer to bighorn sheep,” he wrote WyoFile. “I requested a field trip…”

That movement of stock toward the bighorns is what got Kroger, the Game and Fish biologist, involved. On his first sheep-survey flight in September, he saw the domestic sheep within 3.5 miles of the bighorn herd, he said.

Biologists already considered the mega-herd a “dirty” group that harbors pathogens, Kroger said. It’s also more resistant to some infections, compared to other groups of bighorns. Nevertheless, worries that disease — widely accepted in scientific circles as the single largest existential threat to bighorn sheep populations — might run rampant among the wildlife remain serious, and so Kroger took off for his aerial kill mission.

[jeffreyi]

1. Bighorn sheep and domestic sheep mingling

Is certain death for the bighorns. Wish there was some way to vaccinate them.

[2naSalit]

4. Vaccinated wildlife are no longer wildlife.

Domestic animals don;t belong everywhere and they encroach on what little habitat is left. The domestic animal should be vaccinated and not allowed in wild sheep habitat, period.

[pansypoo53219]

2. why have sheep ANYWHE near bighorns then. can you say buffer zone. fucking humans.

[2naSalit]

3. +1