Home on the Range?
How an ambitious plan to reintroduce desert bighorn sheep to Big Bend Ranch State Park has ignited a fresh debate about the politics of wildlife management, budget priorities, and who gets to play God in far West Texas.
Illustration by Hugh Syme
Editors’ Note: On March 20, 2012, shortly after this story went to press, Texas Parks and Wildlife executive director Carter Smith announced that the department would suspend its policy of lethally removing burros from Big Bend Ranch State Park until the feasibility of non-lethal removal options could be assessed. As an initial step, Parks and Wildlife and the Humane Society of the United States will share the cost of an aerial survey to establish how many burros are currently in the park.
In October 2007 a park ranger named Raul Martinez was working on a road in Fresno Canyon, in Big Bend Ranch State Park, when he smelled something funny. Martinez picked his way up a hill through cactus and creosote to a spot about two hundred yards from the road, where he came upon a dead burro. A few feet away he found another. Although predators had been chewing on them, Martinez could tell that the animals had been shot. The smell by now was overwhelming. Before he was forced to retreat, he counted seven in all, strung out in a rough line, every one of them apparently slaughtered with a high-powered rifle. Martinez was heartbroken: like many of his fellow park employees, he loved the wild burros, shaggy descendants of animals that had escaped over the decades from ranches on both sides of the river.
An investigation by the Internal Affairs Division of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department came to a startling conclusion: the burros had been killed not by some renegade hunter but by two high-ranking Parks and Wildlife officials, who were preparing the park for a planned reintroduction of desert bighorn sheep, a species that hadn’t been seen there for more than fifty years. The restoration project called for the removal of the nonnative burros, which have been known in other parts of the country to compete with bighorns for forage and water, but this decision had not been communicated to the park rangers before the shooting began.
The Big Bend Sentinel, a weekly newspaper, broke the story of the burros that winter—about seventy had been killed in all—and statewide media followed up, which is how many Texans learned about the plan to release bighorns inside Big Bend Ranch in the first place. It was supposed to have been a triumphant moment for Parks and Wildlife, a major milestone in a decades-long effort to bring bighorns back to their historic range. Instead it was a public relations disaster. Officials ordered a halt to the killings, and the furor gradually faded away. In 2010, however, as Parks and Wildlife prepared to release its first bighorns into the park, the department quietly resumed the practice.
This past January the Wild Burro Protection League used a burro-drawn wagon to deliver petitions opposing the policy to the state capitol. The following morning, the Austin American-Statesman ran a photo of a nine-year-old girl atop a very cute burro, and Parks and Wildlife officials once again found themselves on the defensive. Parks and Wildlife executive director Carter Smith is currently in discussions with the Humane Society of the United States to assess the feasibility of trapping and relocating the burros, though no plan has been finalized.
But as it turns out, burros are only part of the story. Parks and Wildlife also has a “lethal removal policy” for other animals that compete with bighorns, including elk and aoudad, an exotic type of horned sheep that was brought to Texas from Africa as a game species in the fifties. In addition, the department routinely traps and kills mountain lions—the bighorn sheep’s main predator—on public lands in which bighorns have been reintroduced: the 300,000-acre Big Bend Ranch as well as three wildlife management areas in the Trans-Pecos. (Big Bend National Park does not participate in the bighorn program.)
It may seem like a lot of trouble to go to on behalf of one animal, but the bighorn sheep is no ordinary species. It is a highly prized big-game animal found in isolated pockets of the Rockies and the desert Southwest, and the department, which issues permits for bighorn hunts, has a great deal invested in its successful reintroduction. With the recent releases in Big Bend Ranch—46 sheep in 2010 and 95 in 2011—as many as 8 separate populations of bighorns can now be found in the mountain ranges of the Trans-Pecos. Yet the program’s mission is far from complete. The department’s private partner, the Texas Bighorn Society, a group of sheep-hunting enthusiasts and conservationists who have provided considerable funding for the reintroduction program, would like to see the bighorn returned to its entire historic range, which is to say almost all of the mountains of far West Texas. It is one of the most ambitious programs that Parks and Wildlife has ever undertaken; fully realized, it would represent a major step toward restoring the pre-nineteenth-century ecosystem of the entire Trans-Pecos.
Conservation planning on such a large scale is seldom discussed in Texas, where 97 percent of the land is privately owned. Few would argue that such a vision isn’t sorely needed; the problem is that not everyone agrees on what a restored Trans-Pecos should look like—and not all visions are compatible. “As fish and wildlife managers, we have to make choices about what we manage to realize our conservation goals,” Smith told me. “This is not an either/or proposition between mountain lions and bighorn sheep.”
We think of wilderness as the opposite of civilization: there is the natural world, and there is the world of man. But in a place as thoroughly exploited as Texas, where even the most remote areas have been mined, grazed, developed, or bent to the will of some other, long-forgotten enterprise, wilderness is something that must be created too. While the science we call wildlife management requires research and years of hard-won experience, it is, at its core, an exercise in politics, like every other human endeavor. In the Trans-Pecos, this means that animals with constituencies, like the desert bighorn sheep, can count on a place in a newly restored wilderness. The rest of God’s creation, it seems, is on its own.
Desert landscapes are often described as timeless, and the vast emptiness and staggering vistas of the Big Bend certainly suggest a land that somehow escaped the creeping curse of modernity. But this is an illusion. In fact, the landscape here has changed dramatically in a relatively short period of time. If you walk through the low-lying areas of Big Bend Ranch, you will find a hard-packed desert floor checkered with clumps of creosote and cactus, but a visitor in the nineteenth century would have found the desert covered in two feet of dense grama and tobosa grass. Buffalo and pronghorn antelope moved across the plains. Bighorn sheep and mule deer occupied the high country, along with wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions. Huge cottonwoods lined the banks of the Rio Grande, then a broader and swifter river. Golden eagles were as common then as red-tailed hawks are today.
After the U.S. Army drove the last bands of Plains Indians out of the region in the 1870’s, immense herds of Longhorns arrived, driven by a handful of entrepreneurs in search of open range. Commercial hunters appeared in the 1880’s, along with the railroads, and began shipping huge quantities of bighorn, deer, and pronghorn meat to northern cities. Mining boomtowns sprung up at quicksilver strikes, and the cottonwoods were chopped down to feed the smelters. Farmers drained the Rio Grande for irrigation. Overgrazed for decades, the grass was largely gone by 1910. In crept the creosote, whose roots poisoned the ground and whose leaves virtually no animal will eat.
What finally doomed the bighorns was the arrival of large-scale domestic sheep operations, which replaced cattle ranching in the late twenties. A bighorn has about as much in common with its domestic cousin as a wolf does with a poodle. There is almost no terrain too rough or too dry for desert bighorns, which can go for months without drinking, getting all the moisture they need from grasses and forbs. Hardy as bighorns were, however, they had no natural resistance to the diseases and parasites that the nonnative domestic sheep brought to the Trans-Pecos. In 1945, when the state’s entire bighorn population had dwindled from an estimated high of three thousand sheep to fewer than two hundred, the Legislature created a refuge called the Sierra Diablo Wildlife Management Area, in the Sierra Diablo Mountains, about twenty miles north of Van Horn. But by then, the remaining herd was too small to sustain itself, and before long, they disappeared. Early efforts at restocking sheep were largely exercises in frustration. In the late fifties sixteen bighorns from Arizona were shipped to the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area, east of Big Bend National Park, but disease and predation wiped out most of the herd. Aoudads, which proved much more adaptive and aggressive than the native sheep, covered much of the bighorns’ range, further hindering efforts. By the late seventies, the effort to bring bighorns back to Texas had run out of steam.
The program was resuscitated in 1981 by Dr. James “Red” Duke, the world-renowned trauma surgeon. Duke was on duty when President John Kennedy and Governor John Connally were rushed to Parkland Hospital, in Dallas, but most people remember him for his televised health reports, in which he gave medical advice in an outsized Texas accent from behind an enormous red mustache. He was equally famous in the insular world of big-game trophy hunters, and bighorn sheep were his passion. Duke was the driving force behind the creation of the Texas Bighorn Society, which essentially took control of the state’s moribund program. Then, as now, Parks and Wildlife was strapped for funding, so TBS members raised $200,000 to build a brood pasture at Sierra Diablo, which they stocked with sheep procured mainly from Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. Over time, the herd grew to the point that animals began to leave the refuge and repopulate privately held lands in the adjacent Baylor and Beach mountains. In 1985 a rancher, impressed with the TBS’s work, donated a 23,000-acre spread south of Alpine known as Elephant Mountain for the primary purpose of bighorn sheep propagation, and sheep from Sierra Diablo were brought in to start a new herd. Eventually, a thriving bighorn population was even established in the old Black Gap WMA.
The three WMAs—Sierra Diablo, Elephant Mountain, and Black Gap—began operating essentially as sheep factories: predators and exotic game were controlled, access by the public was limited, and water was provided to keep the animals healthy and happy. The results have been remarkable by any reckoning. By 1990, the number of sheep had become stable enough that a hunter was allowed to shoot a ram at Sierra Diablo, the first bighorn legally taken since 1903. In 2011 sixteen permits were issued, and today an estimated 1,200 bighorns live along eight mountain ranges, bringing the population in the Trans-Pecos back to what it was believed to have been in the 1880’s.
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