The expedition to find sheep in unlikely placesBy: Kristin Fratella Part 1 It’s our first night at camp in the Marble Mountains for survey training and the weather is perfect. With a casual scan of the ridgetops, we spot a bighorn sheep, and end the day with a picturesque sunset. “Is this what every day is going to be like for the next 2 months? How magical!” Said the naïve but optimistic technician in training (that’s me). It would quickly become evident that I didn’t fully understand what I had signed up for, though I was excited for the adventure ahead. Turns out it is much harder to find bighorn sheep than day 1 let on, especially when you’re looking for them in unlikely places… The mountain ranges around Blythe, CA haven’t been surveyed for desert bighorn sheep in many years. State records from the early 20th century have little to say about this area, and what has been said is that bighorn haven’t lived in these ranges for quite some time. So, it’s not surprising that bighorn managers spend their time and resources elsewhere, leaving these ranges a bit of a black box in terms of their use by bighorn sheep. Still, there is rugged terrain, several seasonal water sources, and other populations of bighorn relatively nearby, so why wouldn’t they use this habitat? GPS collars and genetic data tell us that bighorn move around multiple habitat patches in this region – their ability to move between mountains is crucial to their persistence in a landscape that changes constantly with drought, development, and unpredictable forage. We wanted to get a better idea of what was happening in the Blythe area. Are we underestimating this habitat? Have bighorn returned to these mountains? We set out toward Blythe, CA to find out whether bighorn are using these mountains and if so, to what extent. It turns out sheep are pretty hard to spot even in places with thriving populations, so we look for the distinct sign they leave behind, like fecal pellets, tracks, bones, or bedding sites. To learn more about our survey process, check out: Sign surveys for bighorn. This expedition would be the ultimate test of whether our sign survey worked. We designed this survey to be the first line of inquiry in areas of little data – a cheap and easy way to know if the habitat is worth exploring further. If bighorn are present in these mountains, we may want to monitor them through the challenges they face in the future, and if they’re not here, we might take a closer look at why. A little back-story on this particular stretch of desert: she’s been through a lot. Prior to becoming a mostly protected collection of wilderness areas, indigenous people used this region for thousands of years. The once abundant water of the Colorado River was and continues to be an invaluable resource for many tribes, and their cultural marks are evident in the Blythe intaglios, petroglyphs and other artifacts throughout the desert. In the late 19th- 20th century, mining and military activities dominated the region. Mining took place from 1862 and continues today. Copper, uranium, gypsum, manganese, lead, silver, gold, zinc, and other minerals have all been found in these ranges. Between 1942 and 1944, the U.S. military used the entire region of Palen Pass to train over a million soldiers for World War II. The Palen Maneuver Area utilized an assortment of vehicles, tanks, and planes for training. Mock fortifications were constructed on the ground, in the mountains, and in washes, including gun emplacements, barbed-wire entanglements, bunkers, minefields, and foxholes. This was mainly to set the stage for mock battles where two divisions were pinned against one another. The mission was straight forward, one team would try to gain passage; the other was set to prevent passage. The first mock battle was said to be the largest. Sgt. Joe Delgado, a participant in the battle, recalled the combat decades later: “First came the airplanes and strafed hell out of it. Then the artillery shells began to cover the ground, next came tanks rumbling into the pass blasting away and finally streams of troops. There was so much dust and smoke up there you wouldn't think anything could be alive for miles. But when we stopped, and the smoke began to clear, someone shouted, "Hey look up there, what's that moving?" And just like nothing at all had been going on, this old dusty prospector and his burro, looking like something from the last century, came walking through all that smoke and dust and debris paying no attention at all to any of us or all the live ammunition we'd blasted that pass with..” If bighorn sheep ended up high tailing it out of these ranges after all of that, who could blame them?
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