After intense helicopter capture, bighorn sheep are off to greener pastures

VALLEY OF FIRE — Blindfolded, sedated and dangling 100 feet above the ground in a net off a helicopter, dozens of bighorn sheep are less than a day away from a new beginning — if they make it at all.

“It’s kind of like an alien abduction,” said Nate LaHue, a veterinarian with the Nevada Department of Wildlife. “Things happen that are out of our control. But to the best of our ability, we want to keep these animals safe.”

It’s day two of operation bighorn, a $1.2 million effort in which state wildlife officials are capturing roughly 150 for transport to a sanctuary in Utah and two mountain ranges in Northern Nevada. Kuiu, a hunting clothing brand, contributed $200,000 to the fund, and more donations came from nonprofits such as the Fraternity of the Desert Bighorn, Nevada Bighorns Unlimited and the Wild Sheep Foundation.

A helicopter circled the Muddy Mountain range for hours on Wednesday in pursuit of sheep to capture.

The Muddy Mountains, found in Valley of Fire State Park, have proved to be a bad place to be a bighorn following prolonged drought in the region. Not nearly enough “groceries on the ground,” or grass and shrubbery, increases competition in the herd for basic access to food and water, said Joe Bennett, the wildlife department’s game supervisor for Southern Nevada.

In 2021, considered a wetter year by precipitation records, 1,000 sheep were in the region, dropping to 880 in 2023 because of drought. Aerial surveys this past September found about 442 sheep in the herd, Bennett said.

The wildlife department regularly has to use helicopters to fill remotely located, massive water guzzlers within the state park to prevent the herd from dying off.

“Removing some sheep is for the betterment of the entire herd,” Bennett said. “Just leaving them on landscape would require us to hold water in perpetuity or forever. It’s a necessary thing we have to do to manage this population.”

Capture turns deadly in one instance

While needed to keep them alive, the transport process is somewhat perilous — and remarkably foreign — for the animals.

During the helicopter’s third go-around witnessed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the normal rush to lift up the animal onto a table for veterinary treatment was quickly replaced with a hush and solemn mood.

In the short time between when it was sedated, lassoed with a net and lifted up into the air, one of the 25 or so sheep supposed to be captured that day was dead before it reached the ground at base camp.

Doug Nielsen, a department spokesman, said mortalities during captures like this one are rare, but they do occur. It was unclear whether the triple-digit heat, the sedative or general shock had caused the death. If disease is suspected, the department’s Reno headquarters may order a necropsy, or animal autopsy, Nielsen said.

“As you can see, everyone is pretty sullen,” Nielsen said. “We accept that it’s part of the process, but we don’t like to see it happen. It’s a very small percentage.”

Disease a top concern

A little-known fact about bighorn sheep underscores the thoughtful consideration of where to relocate them: Almost every herd in Nevada is diseased.

The Muddy Mountain herd is disease-free, meaning officials’ options were limited in deciding where to place them. Pneumonia is rampant among most bighorn sheep herds, including the famous Boulder City one that greets visitors at Hemenway Park.

Veterinarians collected blood samples from the captured sheep, sending them off to a lab in Washington state that will verify that the herd remains disease-free before the sheep are released this week. They also gave each of the sheep a GPS neck collar that will allow officials to determine where they go after they are released.

“Our first consideration is always disease,” said Bennett, the game supervisor. “We don’t want to expose naive sheep to disease.”

Where are the sheep going?

Packed up into an open-air van that resembles a horse trailer, the sheep are heading to better and greener pastures with a buffet of belly-high grass.

A third of the sheep will reside in a fenced-in Utah sanctuary, about 60 miles northwest of Salt Lake City near Promontory Point. The nursery is meant to re-establish the state’s population of bighorn sheep, which has faced threats such as human activity and habitat loss from development.

Another portion goes to the Cortez Mountain range, roughly 70 miles southwest of Elko in north central Nevada. Sheep historically had been at that location until they moved on, so the sheep moved there will establish a completely new herd.

The last destination is the Tobin Mountain range south of Winnemucca. Wildlife officials have determined that the strain of disease within the existing herd isn’t being passed on to its young, signaling that it’s not contagious, Bennett said.

For veterinarians like LaHue, the bighorn operation is rewarding and a key tenet of wildlife medicine.

“We’re going to augment a herd, but we’re also going to start a brand new translocation, restoring bighorn sheep to a range that they’ve been extricated from probably since the early 1900s or late 1800s,” LaHue said. “It’s why I got into this field.”

Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.