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The desert bighorn ewe stood silhouetted against a blue sky high on the rim rock inside the entrance to Cañón el Álamo. She was soaking up the last warming rays of the evening sun, her face nearly all white, revealing her age. Nearby her lamb of the year lay sprawled on a limestone rock, also enjoying the sun. I watched her through my binoculars. She was staring directly west, motionless. I wondered if she was thinking of her homeland, the Isla del Tiburón in Sonora State. Her homeland in the Sonoran Desert , which blended directly into the Sea of Cortez, was a far cry from the Chihuahuan Desert that she now called home. Did she miss the cardón cactus, the blazing Sonoran sunsets , seeing whales in the sea, or never having seen or smelled a puma? Or was she content here? This ewe, along with other sheep, made a long journey from the Sea of Cortez to Coahuila. First, they were netgunned from a helicopter, carried on a boat to the mainland , and transported by trailer to the Yaqui Reserve. (The Reserve, created by CEMEX for the desert bighorn conservation program, is located near Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico .) Several years later, she and others were recaptured by net gun, worked up and radio collared, and then transported some eighteen hundred miles to the Chihuahuan Desert in Coahuila. This is a stressful procedure for any wildlife, to say the least, but necessary if she were to be remembered as one of the founding members of the first wild herd of desert bighorns to roam these mountains in over fifty years. 12 Los Pilares and Desert Bighorn Sheep In the Shadow of the Carmens 76 Did she know how important she was? I doubted it. She couldn’t have known that, when I went to bed at night, I hoped that she and the other members of the wild herd were safe on a Coahuila mountain, and that a puma was not padding along keeping a watchful eye, waiting on the perfect moment to make a kill. The desert bighorn formerly roamed these desert mountains, but just like in western Texas, they were extirpated some fifty years ago. Rollin Baker sent me a photo of a desert bighorn taken by hunters in the late 1940s or 1950s in the Sierra de San Lázaro in Coahuila. This may have been the last recorded desert bighorn in the state. The desert bighorn in Coahuila was unevenly distributed in several desert mountain ranges and, like the Texas bighorn, also fell victim to diseases transmitted by domestic livestock, particularly sheep and goats; loss of habitat; and unregulated hunting. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department began a desert bighorn restoration program many years ago, and later the Texas Bighorn Society joined in helping put sheep back in West Texas. Today the state of Texas boasts more than one thousand desert bighorns scattered in seven different mountain ranges. During my tenure of almost ten years with the Department as a wildlife technician working at Black Gap, I learned a lot about desert bighorn ecology and what could go wrong in reintroductions. Desert bighorns are one of the toughest yet most fragile wildlife species I have worked with in my career. I have always thought of desert bighorn as chickens one day and feathers the next. A healthy herd might be doing well, lulling you into a false sense of security , when, seemingly overnight, right before your eyes, the sheep succumb to diseases picked up from something as small as a gnat, or are reduced to piles of bones by a female puma with two hungry yearlings. On one such occasion, I recall being tossed around in a Cessna 206 high above desert cliffs, listening to not one but several mortality signals on my radio transmitter. Reintroducing desert bighorns is never easy— it takes years, money, politics, more money, surplus sheep, habitat, grueling days in desert heat, more money, heartbreak, more money, and years of all this, and maybe you have a successful bighorn sheep reintroduction. Yes, more money is still needed. But, you never really get comfortable because you know in the back of your mind that tomorrow everything can change. The CEMEX El Carmen Project has an important mission and a challenge to restore lands and native wildlife to the Carmen Mountains. At the inception of this project in 2000, a top priority was the reintroduction of desert bighorn sheep to historic habitat in...

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