DesertBlog

Bighorn Sheep Are Counting On You

You’re hiking up a rugged desert canyon somewhere at the eastern edge of southern California’s Peninsular Ranges. The truck-sized boulders glow golden in the bright sunshine, and up ahead a clump of fan palms enlivens the mostly brown landscape. You hear the call of a phainopepla, but other than that the only sounds you hear are your own breathing and the crunch of your boots in the desert sand.

Then another sound catches your ear, seeming out of place, almost intrusive: the clatter of stones falling on the hillside above you. You look up and at first see nothing that could have made the noise. Then you spot a movement farther up: a gray-brown body moving with astonishing speed up the near-vertical slope. It finally stops on a rock ledge, silhouetted against the blue sky: a bighorn ram, its full curl of horns marking it as an adult in its prime. For a moment, the ram looks back at you, almost quizzically, then disappears around the corner, leaving the canyon feeling much more alive than it had just a moment before.

You may have had such an encounter while hiking in southern California’s deserts. Or maybe you’ve just seen bighorn scat or tracks on your desert outings, giving you the hope of seeing one of these majestic mammals in the flesh. Or maybe you just like the idea that they are still out there, living wild and free in a rugged landscape.

Unfortunately, the US Fish & Wildlife Service seems bent on ensuring that such experiences become increasingly rare in the Peninsular Ranges, if not entirely things of the past. The agency is pushing ahead with a plan to cut designated critical habitat for the bighorn by more than half, defying both common sense and well established principles of conservation biology.

You still have time — until October 27th — to write a quick comment on the agency’s misguided plan. We have a complete action alert up on our website, with a link to the government’s new online comment form. (Or just find the form at the yellow cartoon balloon labelled “Add Comments” on this page.)

Here are the comments I submitted yesterday (and you definitely don’t need to write this much):

The proposal to cut Peninsular bighorn critical habitat by more than half is arbitrary and will do irreparable harm to this population of desert bighorn. Further, it violates key principles of wildlife management and ecology, and rests on flawed assumptions.

The proposal cuts vital habitat for bighorn in just the type of habitat that these animals need during the difficult summer season. The small trees, principally catclaw acacia, growing in low elevation washes provide vital summer forage for the sheep. Allowing development in these washes will affect the bighorn’s ability to survive.

By breaking the habitat into three separate units, the proposal also violates the key conservation biology principle of habitat connectivity. It doesn’t even retain any sort of corridors between the separate units, and actually removes from the critical habitat designation the known corridor for bighorn migration between the Sawtooth Mtns. and the Vallecito Mtns. If migration corridors don’t qualify as critical habitat, it’s hard to imagine what does.

The proposal also inappropriately relies on bighorn sightings to establish critical habitats. The current revision did push back the earliest date on which sightings would be considered, thereby adding more sightings to the study and more acres to the new proposal, but the entire assumption is flawed, for two reasons.

First, sightings require humans to have visited an area to make the sighting, and to have reported that sighting. Given the rugged and inhospitable nature of much of the bighorn’s habitat and the elusive nature of these animals, a lack of sightings indicates neither that the animals are not there nor that the habitat is not suitable, and indeed critical, to their survival. A look at the map of the current proposal shows that areas added back in this revision are mostly in the north, where visitation is certainly more frequent, while the southern half, where visitation is light, has relatively little acreage added back (and a lot taken away).

Second, even if the bighorn have really abandoned an area, this does not mean that the area is not suitable habitat, nor that the sheep will never re-populate the area. On the contrary, Dr. Jon Wehausen has shown that bighorn can and have re-populated areas where they have become locally extinct, provided that no barriers have been erected to prevent their migration. To allow development in areas that currently have no bighorn will make future recolonizations impossible, whether these are accomplished by natural migration or a planned reintroduction.

Finally, the current proposal states that designated critical habitat is unnecessary in areas that are covered by a county-administered multiple species habitat program. This is flawed for two reasons. First, the critical habitat designation may in fact give local officials valuable guidance in where to place multiple species preserves. Second, the multiple species planning technique is a relatively new conservation tool whose effectiveness has not been thoroughly tested. Indeed, in both San Diego and Riverside counties, doubts have been raised about the management of these preserves and the commitment of local agencies to protecting them from development and other abuses. Further, the Coachella plan is not even in place yet. To use such a weak and speculative protection as an excuse to remove the much stronger and more effective federal critical habitat protection is an abandonment of the agency’s duty to protect this endangered species from harm.

In summary, I encourage the Service to reconsider this ill-conceived reduction in critical habitat for the Peninsular bighorn. The Service should restore most, if not all, of the lands this current revision takes away, and especially in those areas that are key migration corridors, summer forage habitat, and possible future recolonization areas for the bighorn.

(photos by Larry Hogue; these aren’t the Peninsular variety of desert bighorn, but you get the idea)

Related posts:

1. Threatened Desert TortoiseThreatened Desert Tortoise Takes Another Hit In March in the Mojave Desert northeast of Barstow California, the US Army began...
2. Good News for Bighorn, Bad News for TortoiseThere was good news for Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep last week, as the US Fish & Wildlife Service finalized critical...
3. How You Can Help the Desert TortoiseFollowing up on last week's post, here are a few things you can do to help the desert tortoise: Comment...
4. Bighorn Sheep Need a Home, TooIn contrast to its good news for the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, the US Fish & Wildlife Service has proposed a revision...
5. Army Rethinks Tortoise RelocationWhile the U.S. Marine Corps has announced plans to expand its 29 Palms base, the Army's Ft. Irwin expansion efforts faced...