BOULDER — After struggling for decades, the bighorn sheep population in the Big Thompson and St. Vrain canyons finally appears to be stabilizing. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause, wildlife biologists at Colorado Parks and Wildlife have ironically linked at least part of the herd’s success to wildfire.
“Sheep typically don’t like closed in areas with a forested canopy so when you have major landscape changes such as a fire, it’s usually pretty beneficial for the sheep,” said Ben Kraft, a wildlife biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “The Big Elk Fire and the fire on Kenny Mountain (in 2002) certainly benefited these sheep.”
Once so abundant in the late 1800s, bighorn sheep were declared Colorado’s state animal, but by the early 1900s the population was nearly wiped out due to unregulated hunting and the spread of diseases from an increasing number of livestock located close to their habitat along the Front Range, the Daily Camera reported .
By 1940, the population of historical herds in the Big Thompson and St. Vrain canyons had dropped to such a point that Colorado Parks and Wildlife, along with the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Society, began transplanting sheep from the more robust herds deeper in the mountains to repopulate those along the Front Range.
Since, more than 100 transplants have taken place throughout the state, including 26 sheep that were transferred to the Big Thompson and St. Vrain canyons from the Mummy Range in 1987 and 22 from Georgetown in 2000.
While the transplants appeared to work extremely well at first, bringing the herd back to around 100 animals, a large die-off, due to pneumonia likely contracted from domestic sheep, decimated the population in the late 1990s, prompting a second transfer. Since additional habitat was created after the wildfires in 2002, however, the Big Thompson and St. Vrain herds are able to spend more time in the high mountain regions and away from diseased livestock, allowing them to recover quite well.
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“When disease comes into a bighorn population you have the potential for all age die-offs for up to five years and after that, you can see lamb recruitment really fall off,” Kraft said. “Sometimes that reduced lamb recruitment can last for several decades.”
Despite their recent recovery, Parks and Wildlife continue to survey the herds each winter to monitor their population and look for signs of disease.
https://www.greeleytribune.com/news/wildfires-help-habitat-for-northern-colorado-bighorn-sheep/Bagikan Berita Ini
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