From: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=2&display=r.../50-wyo-outdoors.inc

June 2, 2005
Wyoming outdoors: Bighorn sheep group racks up accomplishments

Bob Krumm
WYOMING OUTDOORS

Have you ever witnessed a group of people who are fervently dedicated to a single cause? I recently spoke to three members of the Wyoming Chapter of the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep (Wyoming FNAWS) and was struck by their dedication to accomplishing great things for bighorn sheep in Wyoming.

Chapter president Cole Benton proudly recited some of the recent accomplishments of the Wyoming Chapter. "We helped to introduce bighorn sheep into Devil's Canyon on the west side of the Bighorn Mountains. The sheep (14 ewes, three lambs and three rams) came from the lower Deschutes River in Oregon. Most of the money came from the Wyoming Governor's Big Game License Coalition and the Wyoming Chapter of FNAWS."

Kevin Hurley, Wyoming Game and Fish wildlife management coordinator for the Cody region, said, "This transplant was the fruition of a 20-year quest to better match the 'source' sheep to the 'target' habitat, essentially putting a round peg into a round hole. The lower Deschutes River bighorn sheep population lambs earlier and lives at lower altitudes than our Whiskey Mountain bighorn sheep (the source of most of Wyoming's transplants) so that we now have sheep that lamb earlier and can take advantage of the early vegetation green-up."

Hurley continued, "When Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife personnel tested the ewes with ultrasound at the time of capture, 12 of the 14 were pregnant. In mid-April we flew the Devils Canyon area and noted that the ewes were lambing. This coincides with the information we received from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife regarding lambing this April on the lower Deschutes."

While the Devil's Canyon transplant was a high point in the Wyoming Chapter's recent history, it is not the only one. Benton pointed out that the chapter has worked to retire the domestic sheep grazing allotments in the Teton Range, Beartooth Mountains, portions of the Wyoming Range and the Wind River Mountains.

"Domestic and wild sheep cannot co-exist, so we have worked with willing grazing permittees. There was give and take on both sides," Hurley said. "In the past six years, with the help of many partners like Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation, Trout Unlimited, national FNAWS and several FNAWS chapters around the country, we've been able to eliminate the potential for contact between domestic and wild sheep on more than 400,000 acres of crucial bighorn sheep habitat. Furthermore, every one of those permittees is still in business; we feel good about what we've accomplished."

The Wyoming Chapter has also been involved in coyote-bighorn sheep predation studies. Benton said, "Coyotes kill more bighorn sheep and mule deer than previously thought. Necropsies of coyotes near Whiskey Mountain had very high percentages of fresh bighorn sheep and mule deer meat. The range went to as high as 100 percent."

Benton added, "All the money raised by the Wyoming Chapter stays in Wyoming to fund our projects. We have assisted in prescribed burns, predation studies, stop-poaching awards, grazing allotment retirement, sheep surveys, weed control, educational efforts and a host of other projects. From January 1988 to December 2004, the Wyoming Chapter has spent more than $385,000 on a host of projects."

The list of accomplishments is impressive, but there are more projects yet to be done. The Wyoming Chapter is already working with Wyoming Game and Fish toward another lower Deschutes bighorn sheep transplant for this winter. More predation studies are in the works as well as some prescribed burns.

If you would like to learn more about the Wyoming Chapter of FNAWS, you could plan on attending the annual meeting this Saturday at the Holiday Inn in Sheridan. From 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. there will be a series of talks and presentations on the various projects the chapter has sponsored. That evening the banquet and auction will be held. Dinner is at 6:30. For tickets, call Cole Benton at (307) 736-2277 or convention chair Bob Sundeen in Buffalo at (307) 684-5233.


Bob Krumm, of Sheridan, is the Wyoming outdoor correspondent for The Billings Gazette. Contact him at rkrumm@fiberpipe.net.