Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Dusty Timmons with Conservation Stories, and I recently was afforded the opportunity to go to the Hunt Fish Podcast Summit held outside of Houston and interview a number of venturing people for the conservation stories that you'll be hearing over the next couple of weeks.
Included in these are people from all walks of life that are involved in conservation and charitable organizations that I feel will be really interesting. I hope you enjoy the podcast as much as I enjoyed recording the interviews for you.
Good morning, everyone. We're here today with Gray Thornton, the president and chief executive officer of the Wild Sheep foundation, the leading wild sheep conservation organization dedicated to putting and keeping wild sheep on the mountains. Gray, I have had the unique experience of growing up knowing about the Wild Sheep foundation and at least tangentially, you know, from a standpoint of somebody that was a kid reading a magazine and reading about some of the work you did. But tell us a little bit about the Wild Sheep foundation and what you do.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Well, Rusty, good to be on your program. You know, I guess we could look way back and when Lewis and Clark made their way west, you know, 1800, 18, 1802, 1803, 1804, five wild sheep. And in this case, we'll just talk about. Bighorn sheep were one of the most numerous species that they encountered.
And estimates Ernest Thomas Seton, he interesting enough, one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America estimated that in that 1800s time frame, there might have been 1 million to 2 million bighorn sheep in North America. So in Canada, U.S. mexico, unlike a lot of species that hit their lows, big game species that hit their lows in the late 1800s, early 1900s, bighorn sheep didn't hit their lows until the late 1960s, early 70s. They went from, for argument's sake, 1 million down to 25,000.
So huge drop, nearly extirpated.
And the reasons for that are similar to what's happened to other wildlife earlier, but primarily over harvest early on, market hunting early on.
But the big issue is disease. And disease somewhat like a smallpox to Native Americans. We brought domestic sheep into wild sheep range. Domestic sheep have pathogens that they are immune to.
Wild sheep are not. They're naive to it.
Those pathogens then can hurt and or kill the bighorn sheep. So that's the primary reason.
So 1970s, a group of wild sheep advocates, hunters decided that they wanted to form an organization to help the species.
While that's going on, if you look at the, look at how other North American wildlife had increased, you know, it was a user pay program you know, the North American conservation model. Well, because there were so few bighorn sheep, they didn't pay their way.
So they, you know, from an agency standpoint, whether it was provincial, state or tribal, dusty, they just didn't pay their way. They weren't a, they weren't an agency priority. You know, Colorado was funded on non resident elk tax.
You know, I mean, it just, there just weren't. And so what, what wild sheep foundation was formed to do, and back then it was called the foundation for North American Wild Sheep or FANAWS F N A W s. It was founded to raise money, drive that money into those agencies and make wild sheep a priority.
1977, it was formed, you know, funny enough, in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. No wild sheep there, but there were some sheep hunters there.
And where it is today is just phenomenal. Great organization, about 11,000 members worldwide.
Last year we drove $11.5 million into wild sheep conservation and restoration.
But on the big picture, and there's agencies, there are chapters and affairs affiliates throughout North America and we even got Asian ones.
We've increased the number of bighorn sheep from that low of 25,000 to about 85,000 today.
Phenomenal.
But you compare 85,000 to let's say a million, you know, let's go half of what Seaton said. Right. We're a long way away from bringing sheep all the way back. Will we ever. No, probably not. You know, honestly, there's not the habitat.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: That's what I was fixing to ask you. If there was, if there was enough habitat and range.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: You know, I mean, you look at, look at the world, you know, the world population of us.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: You know, we're knocking on the door of nine billion people.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: So. Yeah, and it could be, you know, wild sheep need, they're an indicator species. They need, they need the most remote and most pristine of habitat. Now there's still some of it out there. Obviously we're not growing any more of it.
So, you know, there's habitat challenges, predation challenges, disease challenges. It's kind of, kind of funny. And a biologist that worked for me said something that's a little bit, you know, a little bit sad, but, you know, he says these damn things. When you think about them, they live in the most toughest, unbelievable places. Coldest, hottest, highest, rockiest. You know, you'd think they're the toughest can be. And he goes, these damn sheep were born looking for a place to die.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: I had a rancher tell me one time he raised goats and it was on the deer lease land, he had goats. And I asked him, I said, have you ever raised sheep? He said, no. He said, goats will look for a place to die. Sheep don't care. They'll just die anywhere.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that the truth?
[00:06:22] Speaker A: It is. I mean, it is. And that's one of the things. Earlier I was talking and to your wife and we were talking about sheep. And I said, you know, sheep, it seems to me they were always an animal as a growing up. I used to think they always liked lonely places.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: You know, the remote, hot and dry and cold and, you know, it was a nightmare to get to. Then that's where you're going to find sheep.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: That's where you're going to find sheep.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: But I actually saw my first wild, wild bighorn sheep two years ago. I was fly fishing in Colorado. And we kept. We're on this little windy mountain road and I come around the corner and there's sheep right there. And I'm like going, aren't they supposed to be up in the mountains? And my brother looked at me, said, we're in the mountains.
Oh, yeah, exactly. But, you know, from a flatlander standpoint, it's just that it's something amazing to see the.
You know, there's a couple of things I wanted to get to. Of course, Texas has got the desert bighorn that we're trying and we've had recent struggles with that. We were having good gains for a while, and then I can't remember what disease got into them and just smoked about half of the population we had.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So interesting.
Texas is an incredible success story and then of late a big challenge. But truth. And we're just talking about this at lunch on getting to. Yes.
And I've been blessed to live in Texas. I lived in Texas for 11 years. My mom actually born in Texas and San Antonio, my folks lived in Texas. You know, Texans get to. Yes.
So if there's any state that can, you know, they've done it once, can they do it again? Texans can't. So the Texas situation is really unique.
You know, Texas went from zero desert bighorn sheep to 1800, maybe even up to close to 2000, you know, probably a little south of there, but let's say about 1800 desert bighorn sheep done in just a masterful way, you know, working with the private landowners. I mean, Texas 98% privately held. So, you know, it's got to be in partnership with the landowners. Texas Parks and Wildlife, Texas Bighorn Society, Wild Sheep Foundation.
But they, you know, they brought Texas desert bighorns back.
You know, I mentioned the number of bighorn sheep in North America being around 85,000.
Well, the challenge now. And yes, there's, you know, there's some disease from domestic stock. But the challenge now, I don't want to point at another boogeyman, but, you know, because these things have value.
But in the Trans Pecos region of Texas, there are over 100,000 free ranging audac.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: That's where I wanted to go.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: So, you know, just do the math. You know, if there's 85,000 bighorn sheep throughout, and that is Rocky Mountain bighorn and desert Bighorn, you know, 85,000 throughout North America, Canada, US, Mexico, and you got 100,000 AU dads, you know, Houston, we have a problem. So, you know, what is the problem? Well, interesting enough, yes, Audad can be a vector for what's called mycoplasma ova pneumonia. A movie. It is a pathogen. It is a setup agent. It is typically found in domestic sheep and goats.
Wild sheep can carry it, Odad can carry it.
Maybe some camelids can carry it. But what it does dusty is it, it lays down the cilia in the trachea.
You know, that cilia is those little filaments that, you know, we cough stuff up and, you know, we spit it out and cough things. When it lays down it, you know, other pathogens or other, you know, any, any other viruses or pathogen or other thing that can kill a bighorn sheep.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Get in.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah, typically provides a pneumonic response. They get pneumonia. Lungs fill with, you know, with fluid. They die.
Can be all age, die offs. The crazy thing about Auded though, is they are hardy as hell. You know, we're sitting here talking about bighorn sheep being, you know, geez, you think these things would be so hardy? And yeah, they can eat cactus and they can, you know, they can go without water for long periods of time. From the desert sheep standpoint, damn. Audad can eat rocks and thrive.
You know, they are super hardy. You know, they were introduced into Texas in the 1940s, I think up until Palo Duro Canyon as a huntable species by Texas Parks and Wildlife. They, they are very prolific, they're very hardy. We're now learning that they can even be somewhat resistant to predation. I don't know why, but you know, you got a mountain lion predating in an area, it is more likely to go after a desert bighorn sheep than it is an aide. Why? Don't know. But there, you know, studies now are Saying, yeah, they seem to be a little bit more resistant than, say, the desert bighorn sheep. Audad can lamb twice a year and they typically have twins.
So now you've got this geometric number that's not good on the desert sheep side. So.
Yeah, but, you know, that's the problem. What's the solution? Well, we said it before, Texas is 98%, probably hell.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: You can, you're not going to tell a Texas landowner what he or she can have on their land. It's just part of Texas.
You know, good luck with that. You know, I think that's probably why it's still the Republic of Texas.
So good luck with it. So, you know, the likely solution is there's some, you know, some mountain ranges that, you know, landowners will want desert bighorn sheep, some, maybe not. And that's, that's probably going to be the solution. We're going to have to reduce the audit population. Can we eradicate them? Well, that's a challenge. Again, it's privately held, and that's now private property on privately held land.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. And it's, you know, you run into a situation, too, where an economic model has built around audit.
You know, there's, there's, there's a pay to play in the audit situation. You know, where I, I'm not sure if you're familiar with where Lubbock, Texas is. Sure am. It's flatland. But we're 30 minutes from the Cap rock.
I have a friend of mine who owns a big ranch on the Cap Rock. And I asked him, I said, you know, I was like, what do you hunt that place? He said, no, we got it all leased out to the guy. And I said, what do they, what do they hunt? And he said, well, they hunt a little bit of whitetail, a little bit of mule deer, but mostly it's all that. And I'm like going, how far are you from Lubbock? And he's like, my ranch. From leaving my house to get into my ranch, it takes me an hour and 15 minutes. And so within an hour and 15 minutes, there is a population of Auded that is basically supporting a guiding operation that close to. And it's, you know, it's. The top of the caprock is flat farmland, and the bottom is the rolling is the edge of the rolling plains.
And so you've got this wedge in there and they're just thriving because they can go up and they go down and go up and eat, you know, peanuts or whatever out there in the field, and they can just roll off of it and go down to it. And water is not an issue because there's enough hit center pivot irrigation up there that there's usually water standing somewhere. And if they're a tough enough species, they'll go find it.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's a quandary. You know, we, and you know, we as an organization were and are part of the problem. And you know, I mean it's a, it's an enjoyable species of hunt. It's from a, you know, from a sheep. It's, it's actually a pseudo sheep if you want to get technical, you know, kind of combo between a sheep and a goat.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: But you know, it's often called the poor man sheep hunt. And you know, 55, 65, 70, $500 to hunt an odd ad in a free range scenario in tough mountain conditions, which is very similar to a desert bighorn sheep. That's going to cost you 65, 75, $80,000. Yeah, you know, therein lies the, you know, and there is an economic model for the landowner that hey, it's tough running cattle in that area. And even if you have desert bighorn sheep, well, how many permits are you going to get? So I mean it's, you know, the economics are such that, you know, this is a quandary as an organization. What we've decided to do and we're still in the empathy of, of it is we're just not going to market them anymore and we're going to do work more on education, you know, like we're doing right now on this podcast. You know, I'm going to tell a landowner you can't have audit. Nope, sure not.
That's a losing proposition. But can we educate people on, hey, we got a problem, you know, and at some point we're going to have to ask the question, do you want desert bighorn sheep in Texas? Texas. You know, we went from 1800, you know, we went from zero and then up to about 2000 and down to 450 and we're now down at about 750. So we're, we're half, you know, a little less than half of what we used to be seven, eight years ago.
You know, we don't want to go back to zero. No, I certainly don't. Well, there's been a lot of time Texans do.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: That's exactly right. And you know, the one thing that I say that, that there seems to be, and when I had this conversation, at some point in time you have to have a certain, a landowner has to have a certain level of altruism.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: And it's tough because agriculture, in any ranching, farming either one, it's always been a hard. That's always been a hard life. You know, you have the stories of the slaughters and the good nights that have made, you know, they made it. You know, the four sixes and the pitchfork ranch and all these big ranch and stuff like that. And what people don't remember is like for every one of Those there's an XIT.
XIT was A. You know, it covered 10 sections on the high plain. That's why it was 10 in Texas XIT. And it was owned by syndicate in Chicago. Well, first thing they did was realize, hey, we can't make any money at this anymore. And so they broke it up and sold it into farmland, you know, and so you've got people. And then you wind up with it being, instead of being a big ranch, a series of smaller farms.
And when that had that fragmentation goes and everybody instead of having like, say you have a section, a square mile, well, you got a quarter section and you got four guys on that thing instead of one person. Right. And so that guy's got to make that one little bit. He's got. Make the most amount of money.
And as you get older and people are starting to drift away from like the, the original owners are further away from where we are now. And. And you wind up with people that are less tied to that land, then it's like, okay, their livelihood no longer is tied to this 5,000 acre ranch out in the Big Bend region out there.
Then maybe you can have some, hey, let's have some altruism. Let's clean out these autumns. But then it becomes a situation of how do you clean them out? I mean, from where we are, the biggest invasive species we've had to deal with honestly is wild as feral hogs.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: And we're not in an area that's. We're not a hunter's paradise, but dear lord, could we grow some wild pigs? I mean, they're just everywhere. And you know, getting rid of those has been a. Has been a pretty substantial challenge. We've had a pretty uphill battle getting them down because where they were doing a lot of depredation on our crops, on peanut crops and you know, grain, sorghum and stuff like that, just go in and just obliterate it.
You know, not to mention the fact that, you know, they go out there and they'll root up a. I mean, I don't Know if you've ever driven past a pecan orchard and look around San Saba or something like that, and you see all these big, huge mounds out in there and you're like, what is it? And that's where the pigs have been rooting up out there. And they, you know, they till it up pretty good.
But the, you know, I was, that was one of the things. I'm glad you mentioned the audit because I was wondering how that would impact the carrying capacity.
Well, how much you've done.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Again, you look at, you look at the arid, the arid environment they live in and you know, as I joked, odd ed can eat rocks and thrive. Well, you know, just, just from a population standpoint, they're going to eat the desert sheep out of house and home.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: And, and not only desert sheep, but also mule deer. So, you know, it's going to be, it's. We're not going to be able to, you know, recreationally. I hate to kind of use that word because hunting is so much more than recreation. It's way alive. But we're not going to be able to hunt our way out of this. You know, it's going to be a concerted effort, you know, likely of landowners, you know, you know, a coalition of the willing to say, you know what, we're going to eradicate Audad in this area.
And yes, there's going to be other areas probably that they're going to still be there because that's what the landowner wants. But, you know, we're going to need to make sure that we find safe havens for desert big orange. If Texas is going to have desert big ones. It's just a, it's a numbers game, you know, so Auded are kind of the, the feral horse and burrow to Nevada.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: You know, it's, it's, it's love. You know, they're, they're, you know, there are advocacy groups for feral, you know.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Wild horse. Well, I'm going to call them Pharaoh because that's what they were exactly. You know, you know, Spaniards brought them.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: So, you know, many, many, many years ago. But, you know, they're, they're, you know, are they wild? Well, not really, you know, kinda, but you know, they're not, certainly not endemic and they're not indigenous, so they've been brought in and they're a challenge to the habitat. But they have an advocacy group. Well, AUD are a challenge to the habitat.
They have an advocacy group because they, there's a pay to play model right there for them. So, you know, it's going to be, you know, we're working with our Texas affiliate, Texas Bighorn Society, working with Texas Parts and Wildlife, working with ranchers who want to remove Audad to the best of their ability. You know, we're buying spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on big traps and then we can do disease research on them.
But boy, if we could find something to use them for, that might be.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Where are odd ad native to Barbary
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Coast, Moroccos, Northwest Africa?
[00:20:42] Speaker A: Yeah. How many of them are in the Barbary Coast?
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Now, let me tell you, that is a great question because I was just at the IUCN in Abu Dhabi at the World Conservation Congress and I was talking with a guy, I was giving a presentation on sheep and we're showing some releases of bighorn sheep and capturing stone sheep and the like. And this guy from Morocco is sitting there in the audience and he comes up after he goes, hey, we've done this too. And he shows me pictures of, you know, re releasing Barbary sheep in Morocco where they're trying to repatriate them.
Let me tell you what, I don't know what the population of Barbary sheep are in the Barbary coast, but we got a hell of a lot more of them in Texas, you know, and they're in Texas, they're in Oklahoma, they're in New Mexico, there's some in Oregon. Yeah. So I joked with them and I said, you know, we can rent a 747.
How many do you want?
You, we got them, we got them from you. We'll send them home.
That's exactly right. So maybe that's our solution. We just, we just, you know, we, we get everyone to get some very, very wealthy landowner to buy a 747 or at least lease it. But I just get one of the shops for a while. But it'd be Audad Express.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Just get one of those. One of the ritual guys in Saudi or Dubai or something like that to spring for you.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Yeah, C17, load them up with Audad. And we have the Audac sp Express.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Load up a Globemaster and go take
[00:22:15] Speaker B: them from the Trans Pecos to Morocco.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: We can send you 50,000 tomorrow.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Yeah, we will be more than happy to send it back.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: So when you go to the desert, you know, Texas is, I'm assuming you've got Texas and Arizona. I'm trying to rack my brain on, on my sheep information. The desert bighorn is predominantly Mexico. And then the Texas and Arizona and southern New Mexico, I think is the northern part of the range. Is that right?
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Great, great question.
So, you know, let's go top to bottom.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: So up in Northwest Territories, Yukon and Alaska, we have the Dall sheep, the white sheep, or a thin horn. You know, there's thin horns and bighorns. The Dall sheep are up in that state in those two, you know, those two territories.
Then we go a little south into British Columbia. There's a little section of northwest British Columbia. That's right, touching Alaska, that there are some Dall sheep. But British Columbia then has the Stone sheep, which is a grayish thin horn sheep. Moving west into Alberta, you've got Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, southern B.C. you've got Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep in a subspecies called California bighorn sheep drop into Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, over through the Dakotas, even down into Nebraska, across into Colorado, into Utah, Nevada, little bit northern Arizona and northern New Mexico, you have Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep. And the California, southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, desert bighorn sheep. And then this, the states in Mexico, Baja California, Sur, Sonora, Coahuila, Chihuahua, a little bit of Nuevo Leon, you have desert bighorn sheep. So desert bighorn sheep are in the desert. So southwest, there are little, you know, there's some, there's some desert bighorn sheep that are been translocated, quite frankly up and into some northern Nevada, southern Utah, southern Colorado. But basically it's a desert Southwest for the desert Midwestern US for the Rockies and the California and then British Columbia for the Stones and then Dalles are
[00:24:52] Speaker A: up on the, the north the most.
The thing that made my brain do a little radio stop on that was when you said Nebraska. Yeah.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: So you got the Wild Hat, Wildcat Hills and Pine Ridge area. There's a cool little section of northwest Nebraska that's got a great population of bighorn sheep. It's not huge, but they've done an exceptional job on it. There's some great, great rams that come out of Nebraska.
Yeah, it's fabulous. And they've got a, they got a, you know, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission do a great job of managing the sheep. They, they have had some disease issues there. They're working and we're working with them as a great, great partnership and collaboration on potentially and eventually building, building kind of a disease mitigation facility there in Nebraska that they can do testing programs of this mycoplasma over pneumoniae and separation strategies on there just to keep that herd healthy.
Now, a funny one, and I was chatting with one of the compatriots Here there is a little population of bighorn sheep that sneak over into Oklahoma too.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: No kidding.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: Oklahoma doesn't want to talk about it.
Oh, no. Now we got to manage for bighorn sheep.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: That's like every time they find an elk north of Lubbock, oh, it had to have escaped from the ranch. I'm like, there's not a game ranch up there like that. Moseyed in from New Mexico somewhere.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Yeah, but everybody. But like, it's kind of like I've never seen a game warden get quieter than when you ask them about that. Like we don't have, we don't, we don't have them there.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: Yeah, we don't. It's kind of the same thing. No, we don't have big hordes in Oklahoma. Well, what about there? But yeah, so it's, you know, so the, you know, kind of the northern ranges of the, the desert southwest states, other than other than Texas, you know, I mean, periodically I'm sure, you know, bighorn sneaks down. You got, you got actually bighorns, but mostly desert bighorn.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Well, but going Texas, when we talk of Texas, how is, how is the population of the desert bighorn doing in making its Mexico in the southern ranges?
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Now there's the million dollar question.
You know, if you look at the population of wild sheep in North America, you know, we used to say we had about 9,500 thousand thin horns. So Dall sheep and stone sheep, we had about, you know, we have about 85 to 90,000 bighorns. Rocky Mountain desert bighorn sheep.
One thing that's very interesting is in Mexico and I can even show you where we've done it. In Arizona, New Mexico. In Texas, we grow desert bighorn sheep.
So very much like a Texas behind fence model of intensive management, game ranching, whatever. In sonora, there's about 15,000 desert bighorn sheep. The state of Sonora in Mexico, 50% or so of those are behind wire actually grown.
So you know, and you can hunt them behind wire. Wild Sheep foundation doesn't recognize a behind wire. You know, when we, you know, for our, either our awards program or our fanaz, the four North American wild sheep, we do not recognize a ram harvested behind wire. We don't criticize those that do it. Yeah, is what it is, man. You know, but this, we just don't recognize that in our wards program.
But several years ago we worked with, with our Mexican partners and we called it our Mexico initiative. And the whole idea, Dusty, was why don't we use market forces to incentivize the behind wire folks to create free range sheep, desert bighorn sheep. Behind wire hunt is about 35,000 desert bighorn sheep outside of, you know, in a free range scenario is about 65,000.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: $30,000 discount. I'm just using.
But so, you know, we talked to some of our Mexican friends that you know, said, well, how come you don't work with us on well, why don't you let them go and we'll show you how it'll benefit you. Now there's a risk.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: Once you let them go, you know, you're, you're letting go, you know, a $35,000 cow.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: You know, or I mean you are. Yeah, that's the reality. So. So, well, what do you do?
You make sure that their habitat is good, you know, few predators, water, you know, in the desert, water is wildlife, you know, water is king. And so, you know, provide water, ensure that you're, you know, you're repatriating them to suitable and the biologist can say no, this is good, you know, there's good escape cover, there's, you know, there's good forage, you know, there's, you know, periodic grasses, you know, blah blah, blah. And water.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: And so many have done exactly that and have released desert bighorn sheep into historic areas for desert bighorn sheep under free range, you know, either zero fence or cattle fence scenarios and created pretty nice businesses. So we grow desert bighorn sheep in Mexico.
There's great examples of taking behind wire desert bighorn sheep from state of Sonora, bringing them into either Chihuahua or Coahuila, doing a soft release. What is a soft release? They do the same thing in Sonora. Well, you create a penned environment initially, maybe 4 or 5 hectares or you know, 2 hectares or whatever it may be, has habituate those sheep to that area.
Get them habituated. Yep, they're good. Drop the fence, release them and it's being done. I mean we've got, you know, examples of bringing desert bighorn sheep from Sonora into Chihuahua and building herds of 4, 5, 6, 700 desert bighorn sheep under free range conditions.
Same thing. Bringing desert sheep from Sonora into Coahuila and doing the same thing on hundred thousand acre non fenced properties.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: That now you've, you know, you're, you're growing sheep and you know, same thing from zero desert bighorn sheep to 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe even 900,000.
[00:31:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Sheep now propagating free range. Fabulous. So interesting enough, you know, the repatriation of desert bighorn sheep to the desert southwest, a lot of that Was done. Yeah, you know, we, we did that in Texas. You know, we had a, we had a rearing facility, you know, some successes for it. That's how we got up to that 1800.
Same thing, Red Rocks in New Mexico. Same situation often done in Arizona. Big question I have is, can we do that for other species? Yeah, maybe not behind wire, but what if we just found almost cheap sanctuaries, you know, areas that we can reduce predation.
Mountain lion is key, you know, north wolves, north wolverines, grizzly bear, north golden eagles. Now that's gonna be a tough one. It's been since the 70s, since you're gonna do anything on golden eagles.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: I'm a quail guy and you know, I love to see raptors flying. I just love to not see them flying around my quail hunting.
But that's one of those things that you've got.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: Yeah. What are you gonna do?
[00:32:30] Speaker A: You're hamstrung.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that one, that one you're not gonna touch.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: I heard a guy ask a biologist about that one time, said, well, you know, because they were talking about it. Well, you know, number one predator of them is the, well, it's the Cooper hawk, I think is number one. And then number two, right behind it is like a red tail hawk. And then the guy was like, well, do you think we need to start managing those? And the guy was like, I'm not touching that with a T10 foot pole.
Like not gonna even think about it.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: But yeah, you know, here's an interesting little tidbit. Up in Alaska Dall sheep range, and we know because there's a golden eagle migration, you know, through British Columbia. So we know that they're predating on stone sheep too. But research, peer reviewed data is showing that on Dall sheep lambs, about 20% of that predation is golden eagle.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: And again, you know, Dusty, what are we going to do?
[00:33:19] Speaker A: That's. Yeah, hands are tied on that one. He's just kind of. Okay, we'll have to deal with everything else and just.
If we could get it to where it's just that 20% that we're worried about.
Well, excuse me, what is.
Okay, you're. This the Bald Sheep Foundation. It's nation, it's international.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: So you work not just with Rocky Mountain Big, with the big four in here with the Grand Slam Four, what I call it?
[00:33:50] Speaker B: You bet.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: That's. I grew up reading Chuck Adams when he was, you know, chasing his grand slam. When he got the grand slam and all the stories about it and loved watching that. But so what is the biggest international success that you. That you're seeing internationally?
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah, this is, you know, there's amazing. So internationally, you've got. Got argali and that's on the sheep side, then ibex.
So, you know, we have. In North America, we have the sheep and then we have the Rocky Mountain goat. So if you transplant that to Asia, Central Asia, argali, there is the largest species, the altai argali. In Mongolia, there's, you know, probably the, you know, in many hunters, mine, kind of the ultimate argali is the. The Marco Polo sheep. No, that, you know, it's probably right up there with the Altay agali because it's just the largest. There's all sorts of Urals.
Urals in Pakistan, Urals in Iran, Argali throughout the Pamir. So, you know, that's. That's Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: All these politically stable.
[00:34:58] Speaker B: Yeah, all these really fun places to go.
And then ibex, you know, ibex, from Cree cree ibex in Greece to basor ibex in Turkey. Turkeys. I just. I just hunted turkey, oddly enough, just in December.
Right.
Not a few kilometers away from both the Iraqi and the Iran border. I've been looking late.
We were kind of close there, but, you know, those species, it was kind of interesting. And we're. Here's some interesting studies that we're doing right now, which are kind of exciting. But first and foremost, huge numbers of sheep.
You know, there's more Marco Polo sheep than there certainly are stone sheep.
There's more Marco Polo sheep than there are bighorns sheep.
But they're restricted in many ways on importation of the trophy.
Some reasons good, some reasons bad. So what we're doing is documenting the populations and giving good surveys, working with our counterparts there in Central Asia to ensure that those species, number one, have value to the locals.
Their challenges are competition with livestock, but oddly enough, not necessarily. We're not quite sure yet, disease. So that's kind of an interesting thought is how can a biblical animal of domestic sheep brought from Europe into North America create such a problem with pathogens that our sheep are naive to?
Is there something that we can learn from the argali that have been living alongside those same sheep for 5,000 years?
Question. Yeah, I'd like to know. So we're part of a Central Asia initiative is to see if we can find out why. But great hunting opportunities there.
Challenges are just same thing that we face here in many ways. You know, habitat encroachment of domestic stock, you Know, and that would just be groceries, you know, I mean, you know, a herder, a herder's got, you know, his herd, that's his livelihood.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: And those Marco Polo, you just got to make sure there's that balance that that herder recognize that those Marco Polo
[00:37:33] Speaker A: have value to that herder as well
[00:37:35] Speaker B: and to the community. So, you know, it's community based conservation.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: Every acre's got a carrying capacity. You got it. It's, you know, you gotta, you every, it's like you got an acre grocery store. And that grocery store can support seven families or it can, you know, in some place. Some can only do. And you're a landa. You got 30 of them going in there. It's gone. Nuri. That's exactly, you know, that's one of the things that you always look at. You know, we used to always look at it from a, you know, deer, sheep and goats, you know, because sheep would have a little bit of impact on your, on the deer and trying to make sure I get it right. But goats were like a direct competitor.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:14] Speaker A: And so like sheep, they kind of, you kind of had the two circles that kind of overlap. And then here's what they'll both eat. You know, what deer and sheep will both eat. But goats, it's like the exact same thing. Like if you got good goat country, you got good deer country. But if you put goats in that stuff, then all of a sudden you're carrying, if you're putting 50 goats an acre on, then you're dropping your deer carrying capacity on that stuff. And so you're going to run in the same situation with the sheep, I would assume.
Well, any livestock, anything that's going to be grazing, you're going to run into that same thing.
What, what's the, what is the, what is the, the next thing that's going on in Texas as far as like, you know, they're, like you said, we're down to, we're down to 750.
[00:38:57] Speaker B: Yeah, good question.
I, I'm a landowner and I've got some land in Pecos, family land in Pecos. But you know, just to your scenario, you know, I've got, you know, I got ownership of a quarter section, but so I got a survey. So Texas Parks and Wildlife is, is of late, has done a, and I haven't seen the data yet, but has done a survey of landowners. You know, hey, do you want to add, do you want all that, you know, do you have all that?
Do you want them?
If you don't want Them. What would you allow Texas Parks and Wildlife to do?
You know, of late, I think in the fall, there was a approval by the legislature to aerial gun audit that quite frankly has been going on for a long time. So I don't even know why. You know, I mean, it's a, you know, it's an exotic animal. It's not governed by Texas and Wildlife. It's exotic. You own it. It's not like deer.
So, I mean, there's been eradication programs going on either supported or not supported.
So there is an interest in doing some eradication. We're funding traps where you can go into areas and what we really want to do is initially certainly protect those source herds that we have, you know, elephant gap, you know, those, those areas that we do not want aud around that those are big, you know, desert bighorn sheep havens, you know, or should be anyway.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: So, you know, we're purchasing large au dad traps, trap 30, 40 at a time. You know, maybe we do some disease testing, maybe we don't, but get rid of them.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: So again, are we going to, are we going to eradicate them all? That's a tough, that's a tough order.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Because of the, you know, because of the financial implications of doing that. You know, I probably shouldn't say this, but we're probably not going to be able to.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: You know, so.
Well, we'll see. You know, in my personal view, I think we're going to have to look at it from once again, private land state. You're not going to tell the landowner what it can do or she can do on their property. We understand that. We wouldn't do that. That'd be, you know, that'd be suicide.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: But what we could do is go, you know, if it, what do you want audead on your property or do you want desert bighorn sheep? And we first answer that question and I think we're finding, we're going to find that out. And then there are landowners that want desert bighorn sheep or they just, they just don't want audit for a variety of reasons. Because of the carrying capacity.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Capacity. Yeah.
[00:41:36] Speaker B: You know, it's not only impacting desert sheep, it's impacting mule deer.
[00:41:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: It impacts your cattle production if you got a cattle rat. So those, those are what we're gonna have to do. And then see if we can, see if we can limit the population to those areas that we need to limit it.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: Yes. And be nice if you could at least, at least make a consent, you Know a series of concentric rings where you're like, okay, we're gonna clean it out here, then we're gonna push that, it back a little bit further. I'm going to push it back a little bit further. You bet. Let that, that range go. Yeah. So, you know, if I could, if I had a place and could brave a magic wand and replace all that with, with desert bighorn, you know, to me it's a no brainer. You're a heartbeat.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: You bet. That's an endemic species that belongs here. Auded we imported.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Yeah. But I think the tough thing for, you know, some of the branches can be like, listen, I, you know, I get, you know, three to $5,000 for every one of those things. I sell 10 of them, 10 or 15 of them a year. You know, $45,000 is not an insubstantial amount of money.
[00:42:34] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: And if I put Bighorn on here, maybe in 20 years I'll get a permit and I can take that one off of it there.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: And therein lies the problem. And it's, and it's, and it's, you know, in some of these areas, you're not talking 3, 500, you're talking about $7,500 for an audit hunt. And they're not talked to taking 10, they're taking 100.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:54] Speaker B: So now you're talking, you know, $750,000.
[00:42:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: Versus the landowner tag that you get maybe five, 10 years from now, two or three, and you go, well, okay, so I get 65. 65. 65 over 10 years.
So now we're at almost $200,000 versus 750 a year.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:14] Speaker B: You know, again, it's an economic scenario that. And we're just going to have to work within.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: And it's, and be realistic.
[00:43:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And that is stuff. I mean, you know, you know, being Texan, being proud of Texas, I wouldn't change nothing, nothing about Texas. I mean, I'm big. You know, to me it's, you know, it's a great state and everything, but there are things that, you know, when you look at it realistically, you're like, okay, is there something that we can change on this stuff? But it's going to be, it's very anti Texan to think about the things that really need to be done. That's one things where it's really anti Texan to say.
What I'm fixing to say is, you know, New Mexico and Arizona's got a really big leg up on us because both of them have A lot of BLM state forest land, state land. They have a lot of public lands in both of those states that would be, that could be suitable for increasing their population of the desert bighorns.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: Well, and so, you know, here's how we, here's how we bring the desert bighorn back too. And you know, again, there's been some, some good successes.
So working with Texas Bighorn Society, Texas Parks and Wildlife Wild Sheep foundation gave a grant of about $300,000 two years ago, January time frame we translocated, turned out to be 77. But I think the goal was 80 desert bighorn sheep out of Elephant Mountain Wildlife management area to the Franklin Mountain State park right north of El Paso.
So a lot of work being done there with Texas Parks and Wildlife and Texas Bighorn Society public meetings going, hey, we're going to put desert bighorn sheep where they used to be 120, 130 years ago in the Franklin Mountains. That is in Texas. I mean, you think about it, our population centers here in this state to where the desert big ones are. It's a three, four, five hour drive.
[00:45:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: To just go see them.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:12] Speaker B: So what does that mean? Well, out of sight, out of mind.
Well, now we're putting a desert bighorn sheep population 20 minutes out of El Paso.
[00:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:24] Speaker B: Now that is, they can go see
[00:45:26] Speaker A: them like you can stand, look north and see them, see the bighorn. Turn around tomorrow and you turn around
[00:45:31] Speaker B: desert bighorn and there's, there's no auded around there.
[00:45:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: And you know, parks and wild can go, hey, if, if, if any au dad is seen around there, boom, take it out.
So it's exciting. Put some water projects in there first, then translocated the, the desert bighorns. We've had really good lamb crop, good recruitment, you know, good number of the ewes that were translocated were pregnant. They start having lambs. Those lambs are doing well. Texas Parks and Wildlife is doing some good predator control in there. You gotta make sure you're not feeding mountain lions.
And eventually we're gonna have a hunt in there. You know, there will be a population that will sustain a hunt, so someone will be able to go hunt one of those bighorns.
What did we just do? Well, we just created a new, healthy, safe source herd for desert bighorn sheep in Texas. And from a public standpoint, I think you're going to have those folks in El Paso go, hey, wait a minute. That's actually a Texas resource.
Those sheep were from, that was endemic to this great state and we want to make sure they're there. And so I think just in an education standpoint, sooner or later we'll be able to go, okay, we can deal with this odd ed situation.
We're going to eradicate them all. Probably unlikely, but, you know, we can raise the level of the consciousness to say that we're not going to allow ourselves to lose desert bighorn intact.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's the biggest challenge to me. If it's, if it's, you know, and I don't care if it's a finch, you know, a sparrow, if it's a. If it's a. A critter. That was, that was here.
[00:47:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I wanted to stay here, you bet.
[00:47:18] Speaker A: You know, I mean, like, you know, I've got my. In my little neck of the woods, I've got a quarter section of land that's got 50 acres of vineyard on it. And I told somebody, I was like, I. I meant, I was like, I. Well, in my thing, that's my jam. I've got, that's. I grew up on them, love it. I don't have, you know, I've got some mule deer that pop through. I've got enough mule deer now that I'm like, it doesn't surprise me to see them anymore. But 25 years ago we didn't have mule deer, you know, but it's. I mean, it's cotton. This is cotton country. And ain't nothing eats cotton. I mean, it's just right. If it's not a bug, it's not eating cotton. That's just the way it works.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: And cotton. Cotton's tough on the land.
[00:47:54] Speaker A: It can be, yeah, you gotta, you gotta rotate. Yeah, it's. Well, everything benefits by rotation. But, you know, cotton, the problem we run into on the southern high plains is that, you know, in 96, I think they passed the Freedom to Farm act, which opened up where you could place a lot of different things. The government had really strict controls on what, What a farmer could plant. And like, we're. The big push. Selling point was we're going to open up. You're going to make your own decision on what you can plant. Well, that's great, but there's only like three crops that we can actually plant on the southern high plains of Texas. And two of them aren't worth anything, and one of them you can't sell.
And so I'm like, it's not like we can go plant lettuce, right. You know, or strawberries. That's just not going to work, you know, Asparagus works really bad on the southern high plains because there's a lot of sand and it gets in asparagus. It's not a good thing.
Ask me how I know. I know people that have lost a lot of money doing that. But, you know, so. But what I'm looking at is, like, even in the 50 acres of vines that I've got, right? I'm like, you know, what little thing can I do to help that little bird?
You know? And, you know, so I've got, you know, I've got 100 acres that I've managed pretty well. I've got, you know, Quail Forever is going to come out and do a burn in a couple of weeks, and we're going to prescribe burns on it. And. But in what I did in the vineyard is I don't plant a cover crop in my vineyard because we don't get a lot of winter rainfall, and I need all the moisture I can for the vines.
[00:49:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: And so I. This last year, I got ready to do my final plowing in. In late September, and I was like, you know what? My pigweed and carrot weed are about 12 inches tall. They've already gone to seed. They're not going to get any bigger.
So I just left it. So I left an ugly vineyard.
But you know what? This winter we had a couple weeks ago, we had it come through and it was 3 degrees. We had snow on the ground and had a buddy drive through my vineyard, and he said, I saw 300 quail in that 58. I'm like, where'd you see them? He said they were in all those weeds. He said they were just sitting there eating the weeds. That's one of the things. Reading the left before because they see. But little things like that can add up. Yeah. You know, and when you're talking about the desert bighorn, a sheep that. I mean something that's in an area that's. It takes more land mass to support 1.1BigHorn. It seems to me like that's. I mean, with all the challenges that. That avian, you know, conservation organizations have, you know, something like the. The desert bighorn, where you've got to have, you know, big, you know, with me, like my leaving some weeds in some vineyards, you know, that's not a big ask for me. That's right. That's a. Hey, you know what? Instead of spending the day on the tractor, let's go to the lake. That's the ask that it's going for me. But when you've got A landowner out there. And generally speaking, the landowners in the Trans Pecos region are larger.
Just as a rule of thumb, I mean, you're not having a whole lot of ranches broken up into ranchettes and 10 acres because there's not a whole lot of people that are buying 10 acres of desert to live in out there. But from a rancher standpoint, just an individual rancher, you could talk to one rancher and say, I want you to do just one thing that would just help out. I'm not gonna, you know, just. What would that be? Would it be putting in guzzlers? Would it be, you know, just carrying.
[00:51:05] Speaker B: Yeah, they have, if they have sheep guzzlers, you know, for sure. Water, water, water and remove auto head.
That's the big one. Yeah, you know, that's a big one. Make a choice.
[00:51:24] Speaker A: What does good bighorn habitat look like?
[00:51:27] Speaker B: I'm not a biologist, I'm a businessman. But you know, they need, you know, they need water, they need, you know, food sources, so grasses and they need escape cover. You know, that's what, that's what a bighorn looks for. You know, they're, you know, they're, you know, they're predated upon, you know, in that country primarily by mountain lion.
You know, I'm sure golden eagles too. You know, I would, I would imagine. But you know, escape cover, rocky areas. You know, they like, you know, they don't like the flat.
They like, they like an area that they can escape into the rocks and get away from a predator.
[00:52:04] Speaker A: I was wondering that like a flat, when you're talking about Chihuahua, I've actually had the opportunity to do some peanut consulting in Chihuahua, in the state of Chihuahua. I flew into Chihuahua City and went north and northwest, east of there to do some peanut consulting. And when we drive through that desert and you go and look at it and it's like so much of that's just flat and then they'll just be.
I'm going to call it a mountain range for lack of a better term. You know, when you're, when you live in a tabletop, an ant hills mountain, you know, so you got, and I'm assuming that those little, those clusters of
[00:52:40] Speaker B: their little island, island mountain habitats, they're very, very similar.
A lot of parts of Arizona have the same, so same thing. And, and that's what we see in the, you know, the Trans Pecos. You basically have these little, you know, island mountain habitats that are, that are interspersed between flatland. Now the desert sheep will cross, but
[00:53:01] Speaker A: they'd rather not they'd rather be in there.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: Yeah, they'd rather be in that mountain. Mountain up on top.
[00:53:06] Speaker A: They have good eyesight.
[00:53:07] Speaker B: They have great eyesight and they want that escape cover. Mountains are their friends.
[00:53:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:11] Speaker B: You know, rocky areas are their friends. They're amazing, you know, amazing what they can do on rocks.
[00:53:16] Speaker A: It's. Yeah.
[00:53:17] Speaker B: Not quite a goat, but close to it.
[00:53:19] Speaker A: Close enough.
[00:53:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:21] Speaker A: That's pretty amazing. Okay, but go.
Leaving the desert and moving into the mountains.
The California and the Rocky Mountain bighorn.
I'm assuming they're subspecies. They're, you know.
[00:53:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's a really, you know, because here we got. And there's. And there's some. There's a Sierra Nat Nevada bighorn, that's an endangered species. There's a peninsular bighorn, which is in southern Southern California down into Baja California Sur. An endangered species, but, you know, subspecies of, you know, like there's whimsy Cremna bodies Mexicana of desert bighorn. You know, there's all the little, little subspecies but one that's kind of interesting and here's a real conservation success story is the California bighorn sheep. Now, it's a subspecies of bighorn and determined as a subspecies with a different taxonomic makeup, slightly smaller horns.
And the original California bighorns came from what, the kind of, kind of southern, southern central British Columbia, not California, but southern central British Columbia around Junction. It's called the Junction Junction Herd.
From that Junction herd back in the 40s, late 40s, there was a translocation of California bighorn into Oregon to bring bighorn sheep back to Oregon and increase the populations, enhance the populations there.
A lot of those are in these river canyons, the John Day, the Deschutes, the Grande Ronde, these great steelhead streams that also provide really nice sheep habitat.
Mesas up on top. I mean, it's flat on top, but the rocky area below are where the sheep are living and down right to the river and then back up.
The populations have done so well that we have started this program that we're now calling Coming Home.
And our goal and we're raising a lot of money to do it is to translocate some California bighorn sheep back to Southern bc.
So great success story. You know, the, you know, kind of the transnational flavor of that is just superb. You know, here British Columbia gave sheep to Oregon. Well, then other, you know, those were then also translocated.
I think British Columbia also gave some to Utah. But I think there's six jurisdictions that have now have California bighorn sheep.
Originally from this Junction herd in Oregon. So phase one we're going to bring and the herd in the Junction herd right now has got a pretty bad outbreak of mycoplasma ova pneumonia. So it's, they're unhealthy sheep and the Oregon sheep are healthy. We're not going to take healthy sheep and put them on top of unhealthy sheep. You know, it's a death sentence.
So we need to, we need to remove, and we can get into the details of how you do that. Remove the microplat. You know, the movie from this herd takes a long time, but there's, there's a, an area around Ground Forks, British Columbia that has a population of bighorn sheep, that California bighorn sheep that had a serapis, which is a mite ear mite outbreak and it's typically weather related so it's not a disease per se. But hey, they could stand to have a translocation. So we're likely going to move Oregon sheep back into Grand Forks bc repatriate, you know, bring in some, you know, great stock, enhance that population.
Maybe phase two is we've got some California bighorn sheep from Utah. Maybe at that point we will be able to put them back in the Junction or maybe in the Fraser River Valley. But pretty cool deal where if you almost look at the translocations and this is interesting, Dusty, there's been about 24,000 bighorn sheep translocated and about 22 actions since the 19, 1940s. And that is how we brought, you know, the population from 25,000 to 85,000 is doing these translocations. It almost looks like a Southwest Airlines flight map. You know, now some of them been, you know, we were putting square sheep and round holes, you know, the wrong sheep in the wrong area.
It's really interesting. You know, I talked about health, I mean that's really important.
But you know, we were just talking about island mountain habitats. Well, if you put a sheep that is, you know, historically has had a huge migration range that, you know, their, their summer range is far away from their winter range and that's what they're used to. Probably don't want to put them into an area that's an island mountain habitat that they're going to want to move from because they can get into trouble, you know. What does that mean? Well, they want to leave their home and then they're going crazy crossing through where there's domestic sheep, domestic goats, you know, other things that they don't want to get near. So, yeah, so it's a, it's a, it's a pretty wild deal, but pretty, pretty exciting.
[00:58:47] Speaker A: I wonder if you, you know, if you have a population like the, like the junction that you were talking about. This, that's, you know, it's, it's here on this island over here.
It's been that way for a long time.
When you bring in the, that you know, the stock from, even though it originally originated from there, and if you bring it back to that, it's been separated for a long enough time, does that help you break? That helps maybe get your genetic diversity?
[00:59:13] Speaker B: Yeah, you bet. Because, you know, for argument's sake, you're going to have, you know, there's been other translocations and, you know, we've probably diluted the gene pool down on the pure calies. Maybe, maybe not. You know, I mean, we even see it in Nevada where I think there's probably some cross breeding between Rockies and Calis and deserts, you know, I mean, that's, you know, the vets can get into those weeds. But yes, because, you know, you are going to have more genetic diversity, you know, from that expanding population. They didn't bring you back. You bet.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:48] Speaker B: It can create some good, good herd health. That's what we're finding, too, on this whole disease things. It's not just, it's not just the disease. It's like us. I mean, the healthier we are, the more resistant we are to, you know, other pathogens. You know, it's, hey, if you're, you know, yeah, we all get the flu, but if you're really run down, you're probably going to get worse of a flu.
[01:00:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:11] Speaker B: You know, if you're pretty darn healthy. Yeah. You know, you may be down for 24 hours where your buddy's down for five. Well, the same thing with sheep. You know, the healthier they are, the more resistant they can be to these pathogens that are out there.
[01:00:25] Speaker A: Is it. And you may not be able to answer this thing, but is it one of the mobi. Is that something that they get it once they can recover from it and then be resistant to it, or is it something great?
[01:00:38] Speaker B: Great question. Yes and no.
And therein lies a problem. So the, there's many, many strain types of Movi.
[01:00:47] Speaker A: Oh, goody.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: And then there are, you know, there's mo. You know, there's not movi, but there's mycoplasma that we get. There's a mycoplasma bovid. There's a mycoplasma that pigs can get. Mycoplasma ova pneumoniae ovis is sheep.
So there's a whole bunch of mycoplasmas.
The challenge with Movi, yes, there's different strange types. Some are more virulent than others, like the flu.
But what we found, and this is, you know, Wild Sheep foundation has an endowed chair for disease wild sheep disease research at Washington State University. And some of the, some of the research that came out of that and some of the great biologists out of the tri state region of Oregon, Washington and Idaho started to find that you have these super shedders.
And so it's kind of a Typhoid Mary, you know, you can have, you can have a strain of movie come into a wild sheep population and devastate them all. Age, die off. Male, female, young, old, rams, ewes, lambs, dead. Boom, massive die off.
You can have another situation where it may be a die off, but then also some live, they become, they become a vector. So you can, you can eliminate the source of the pathogen. Say it's domestic sheep or goats. You move those away, but you still have, you still have this moby prevailing in that herd for 20 years.
What are the results of that typically low lamb recruitment?
A ewe that has, you know, has, you know, the mycoplasma ova pneumonia in their system initially. When they have the lamb and the lamb is nursing, they're getting antibodies from the mother. As soon as they wean, lamb tips over and dies. So you have extra. Extremely low recruitment of lamb crops for years. So kind of interesting, pretty draconian, pretty rough, but it's working. Is a protocol we call test and remove.
And what we have found, and they were using the Hells Canyon region kind of as a fishbowl to do these studies, is we started to be able to recognize the super shedders. You know, snotty nose, coughing, but they don't die. You know, we can trap them, dart them, net them, whatever, put a collar on them. Now we know where they are, we can watch them.
And these biologists are sitting there watching these sheep going, you know, that lamb is sick. You know, we've even caught her, we've taken blood samples. She's positive for mycoplasma.
She's not dying. But what she is doing is now she's a vector. No nose to nose or, you know, proximity contact with other bighorn sheep. She's giving, she's now the vector, she's the spreader.
Plus she's not having lambs or she's having lambs, but they, you know, they're. They're dead. Once they wean. Yeah, they're. They're just too. They can't. They can't deal with it. They get pneumonia and die.
So the draconian side is test and remove. We test these ones. If they test. It depends on the preference protocol test either once, twice, three times you're out. Some areas it's once you're out and we remove those lethally remove those used. And it could be a ram too, but often a use. So that has been. At one point we felt, and it was discussed that we had cleared mycoplasma ova pneumonia from the Hells Canyon complex. Now some have come in, probably not from a domestic at this point because most of them have moved out, but probably from a, you know, a wandering ram or ewe that was. Did have mycoplasma and brought it back in. But interesting protocol. It's now being done in Idaho, you know, Idaho, you know, is certainly part of the Hells Canyon complex, but now being done in the Salmon river doing test and remove programs to remove those super shutters. So you're removing the Typhoid Mary's. Yeah, eventually it runs itself through, slipping back over to that Central Asia thing.
Part of one of our Central Asia initiatives is to look and see.
Do our Gali have mycoplasma ova pneumonia? If it is, what strain, type is it? Do domestic sheep have it? So we can do blood samples over there, testing over there, blood samples over there on the domestic stock. And, you know, we might be able to learn something from our Central Asian cousins.
[01:05:39] Speaker A: Yeah, that's pretty amazing, the level of things you have to learn before you can figure out how to solve a problem. Sometimes this can be.
I was thinking earlier when you were talking about Auded, it reminds me of kudzu in the Southeast.
Odd, Ed. The bighorn sheep is kind of like kudzu to everything, and it's just one of those things. But it's. You look at the pop. The is. Is the movie relatively new or has. We think it's been in the population.
[01:06:08] Speaker B: Great, great question. Yeah, I don't think it's new. We just didn't know what it was. You know, if you look back and again, I'm not a. I'm not a vet, I'm not a biologist, so I know just enough to be dangerous.
But if you look back at what we were looking at, you know, there was these. Okay, well, you got blue tongue. That's a problem. Pneumonia they're getting pneumonia. What are they getting pneumonia from? Well, there's a bug called manhymia hemolytica. Yep. That's the thing that's killing them.
And actually what they did is they started digging deeper. You know, some of these. Some of these, you know, biologists and PhDs dug deeper and went, what is the. You know, what's the common denominator of these sheep that seem to have pneumonia and die or have pneumonia and clear. What's the common denominator? Mycoplasma, ova pneumoniae. That was the one that lays down that cilia. It's kind of the setup agent.
[01:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:07:05] Speaker B: You know, I hate to use this analogy, but I have in the past, it's not really, you know, you're talking about a virus versus a path pathogen, but you can have HIV and live.
[01:07:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:07:18] Speaker B: You get AIDS and maybe die now, you know, I mean, that's changed. Like, but so there you go.
[01:07:24] Speaker A: At one point in time, that was exactly.
[01:07:25] Speaker B: That was. It was hiv, you know. Well, HIV was your death sentence.
[01:07:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:07:29] Speaker B: But kind of similar. So the.
[01:07:31] Speaker A: The.
[01:07:32] Speaker B: You know, you. You. The.
[01:07:34] Speaker A: The.
[01:07:35] Speaker B: Or. Or. Or even a better way, you know, hiv. But what did you do? Well, you died of pneumonia.
[01:07:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:07:40] Speaker B: You died of this. What was the. Why did you. Why did that young man die of pneumonia? He should have been able to live through that. Oh, his immune system was compromised.
[01:07:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:07:50] Speaker B: So that's, you know, again, not from a biological or a, you know, microbiome. Not the same.
[01:07:56] Speaker A: That's a podcast.
[01:07:57] Speaker B: Simplified version of a pretty layperson, which I am that. Hey, Movi's the setup agent. It allows other d. Deadly pathogens or bacteria in comorbidity.
[01:08:10] Speaker A: I think we've all. Everybody that made it through Covid understands what a comorbidity is. Something like that. Something like that. Well, Gray, I have taken up over an hour of your time. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed it. So give me a website address. People can.
[01:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I would love to. Love to have. Have you join the Wild Sheep foundation, where it's a great group of people, you know, put our heart and soul into expanding wild sheep populations all over the world. Go to wildsheepfoundation.org wildsheepfoundation.org, click on our membership site. It's only 45 bucks to join. We got about 11,000 members worldwide last year, as I said, we put $11.5 million into wild sheep conservation. We'll do more this year, and we can do it with your help.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: Well, after we get Done here. I've got about 45 minutes for my next one. And you'll have 11,001 members in it.
But I did have one last thing. Now your y' all have. Your annual convention is in Reno, is that correct? Is it Reno every year?
[01:09:10] Speaker B: It is. It is. We call it the Sheep Show. It's a Wild Sheep foundation convention. Next year for 2027. It'll be our 50th anniversary. 1977 to 2020 27.
We have a huge show planned. It's February 3rd through the 6th, 2027 in Reno.
[01:09:29] Speaker A: My wife's a CPA. Could you make it like after either earlier than that or after April 15th? Come on now.
[01:09:35] Speaker B: Yeah, sorry. That's what it is. So, yeah, great show. We've got hundreds of exhibitors, the finest guides, outfitters from all over. Unbelievable evening banquets and all auctions. You know, we have Saturday night, 2200 people there for dinner.
We're doing something new this year which is going to be kind of cool on Wednesday. So that is February 3rd. We're going to do a range day. So we're going to have all sorts of firearm manufacturers, optics, all those goodies. Come on out. You can try some of the products right there at a gun club near the. The convention center. So, yeah, going to be a heck of a good time. Three day expo, four nights of banquet. It's lots of fun. We say come for the sheep, stay for the party.
[01:10:18] Speaker A: Well, I will tell you, I have not been to. I have not yet been to the Sheep show, but having been to other. I've been to Pheasant Fest and a couple other ones like that. Even if you're tangentially interested in. In the. The animal that's there. Go. They're always a lot of fun and they're always, you know, a lot of cool. There's a lot of cool people you can meet and just, you know, make sure you go to it. But anyway, Gray, thank you very much. I appreciate it and appreciate giving me your time today.
[01:10:45] Speaker B: You bet. Thank you.
