Images: Donald Jones
By Michael Tennesen
ON A CLEAR, COLD DAY LAST DECEM BER, a helicopter lifted off from an airport in Dillon, Montana, and headed southwest toward the Tendoy Mountains some 20 minutes away. The Tendoys are a small, remote range near the Idaho border with high cliffs, steep ledges and windswept ridges—terrain where agile bighorn sheep can forage, rut and roam.
Dispatched by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MFWP), the chopper held a marksman on a tough mission: to kill a bighorn ram suspected of carrying pneumonia. The effort was part of a broader plan to allow hunters to kill off every one of the 30 to 40 bighorns in the Tendoy herd—an unprecedented hunt in the state, designed to eradicate intractable disease and pave the way for a new herd to repopulate the region. Craig Fager, a biologist with MFWP, says his agency had tried for years to seed a new herd by importing healthy bighorns to the Tendoys, only to have recurrent disease defeat their efforts. “So we decided, why not try something new and see where it takes us.”
Montana is only one of several states taking drastic steps to save bighorns from disease. This February, for example, the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) discovered pneumonia in what had been a healthy herd of about 100 bighorns. Wheezing and frail, the herd suffered a 75 percent die-off, prompting NDOW to dispatch wildlife professionals to gun down the last survivors to prevent the disease from infecting adjacent herds. “Our guys were devastated by having to do this,” says NDOW spokesman Chris Healy. “But if we didn’t do anything, we had a good chance of this thing spreading.” ...
Posts
