Home on the Range: Bighorn sheep return to Franklin Mountains

EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) -- It's been several months since a herd of 77 big horn sheep was released into the Franklin Mountains State Park as part of a larger effort to reintroduce the animals in their historic environments. The herd has been settling in and is expected to grow with more lambs being born soon.

Hunting, ranching and construction led to the disappearance of the big horn sheep decades ago from the Borderland and many mountain ranges in west Texas. But now in the Franklin Mountains, the big horn sheep are getting a second chance. 

If you've driven along Transmountain Drive since early December of last year, you've probably passed by them - and didn't even know it.

"You probably won't be able to see them all that well," said Lydia Pagel, Park Ranger at the Franklin Mountains State Park. "And we know exactly where they are."

An ABC-7 crew started the search early one morning in early February to find the elusive animals - with the help of Texas Parks and Wildlife rangers. All of the 77 big horn sheep relocated to the Franklin Mountains have tracking collars.

Rangers use hand-held antenna devices to find them in the field. It gives them the general direction of their location, you'll still have to use binoculars to spot them. The first glimpse of the big horns came just after 8:30 in the morning.

"We see much wider ranges," Pagel said, "where some of our males have gone from all the way down here all the way to New Mexico. They've kind of circumnavigated this entire mountain range."

The horns can be a give away - particularly if one's looking right at you. Even if they can't be spotted, their collars are also tracked by satellite. Ranger Pagel demonstrated the software they use to monitor their movements. It's not a real-time view, but the map can help rangers understand how they're moving through the state park and beyond. And the big horn sheep have been all over since release.

"Basically it takes a GPS location every hour and uploads every third or so to the database," Pagel said.

The release of those bighorn sheep into the foothills was really a return to what had been previously present in the Franklin Mountains. But the purpose now is to help secure the future of big horn sheep within Texas as a whole. And park staff are hoping that there will be a lot more of them in the park within the next few months.

"We do expect about 80% of them to be pregnant," Pagel said. "And we should start seeing lambs any day now."

Texas Parks and Wildlife released video of one lamb spotted on Valentine's Day, sticking close to its mother. Overall, the big horn are settling in since the December release, with a lot of them congregating in the Castner Rrange National Monument section.

That's also where park rangers said of the younger males had died.

"We were we were all disappointed," Pagel said. "Obviously, you never want mortalities. It's a disappointment. It was a young ram, too. But at the same time, we had really prepared ourselves for some mortalities in that first month. So the fact that we only had one was pretty good."

Pagel said that while the relocation operation tried to retrieve only healthy animals and protect them in transit, there are a number of factors that can lead to death - including disease, injury from the new environment, and even just the stress of the relocation itself. The big horn sheep now in the Franklin Mountains were captured and brought out of the Elephant Mountains near Alpine by helicopter before being loaded into trailers for transport to El Paso.

Just after noon, ABC-7 crews caught the clearest view of the big horns yet - from about half a mile away. Two were near a mid-range peak, just visible from Transmountain.

"The terrain that they like to be in is not necessarily the terrain that I like to be in," Pagel said. "You know, they're going to go up the side of this mountain quite easily, whereas I going up the side of that mountain would be ripped to shreds."

By early afternoon, that seemed like the closest our cameras would get to the elusive big horns - when a stroke of luck brought us within just a couple hundred feet. A group of four males were observing the lower plains near the El Paso Museum of Archaeology on the eastern slope. Wary of our crew, they soon ran back into the foothills.

The Franklin Mountains were not originally considered for part of the big horn sheep re-population program in Texas. The plan was to place breeding populations in remote areas where they could grow - and spread. El Paso surrounds the Franklins on 3 sides which made it a bad candidate.

"In 2018, we had bighorns on 11 out of the 16 historical mountain ranges that had them," Pagel said. "And our numbers were back up to like 1880s numbers. So the population that we had in the 1880s, that was the population we had in 2018 at that time."

But then a bacterial disease - mycoplasma ovipneumoniae or M. ovi - began decimating the herds in Texas, cutting the state's population in half.

And that's what made the Franklins a good candidate after all: not to have the population spread naturally, but to create an insulated population that can be pulled from for other re-population efforts.

"So that's when they started really looking at Franklin Mountains," Pagel said. "Because all of a sudden that that's being surrounded by the city went from a negative to positive."

So if you look closely, and with a bit of luck, you might just see the big horn sheep while driving on Transmountain in the future as they continue to explore their home on the range.