- DEWEY: Brandon, you got a copy?
- ON RADIO: Dewey, we're over here on the south side
and I've got a group of about 50 head of sheep over here.
I didn't know if you wanted to come over here and classify
some of these guys for the capture.
- DEWEY: Yea, 10-4, that's probably not a bad idea.
I'll head that way shortly.
- MAN: Ok, that's fine;
I got another one I think up here.
- WOMAN: Right down here to the right, 5 o'clock.
[helicopter whirs]
- FROYLAN: The mountain ranges out here,
the views, the vistas, all that,
they're great.
But they're nothing
if you don't have wildlife in ‘em.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[sheep horns banging]
[dramatic music]
Kinda have to take a deep breath.
They were here way before we were.
Back in the late 1800s,
there was a healthy population of desert bighorn sheep
across West Texas.
They started to decline in the 1900s
and they attribute that to the introduction of sheep, goats,
the diseases that they carry.
All this country getting fenced up
and unregulated hunting.
By the 1960s, all the native bighorn were gone.
[dramatic music]
A group of wildlife enthusiasts,
of people that love sheep and want to do good things
for sheep and, and all things wild,
they got together and said let's do something about this.
- NARRATOR: Wanting to repopulate West Texas with
the desert bighorn, Texas Parks and Wildlife began
capturing sheep from other states and moving them
to the land they once roamed.
- FROYLAN: Back in the early days, it was pretty rustic,
I would say.
[playful music]
- MAN: And then we'd just, we'd rastle with them a good bit
and it'd get kinda western now and then.
[playful music]
We took three summers to catch 13 prime sheep.
- FROYLAN: Yeah, there were sheep brought in from Arizona,
from Utah, lots of ‘em from Nevada.
Even from Baja California, Mexico.
[net explosion]
[dramatic music]
The sheep are coming back to Texas
and currently there's about 1,500 animals.
- MAN: That was a real red-letter day when we suddenly
saw a young lamb nursing a ewe on top of one of those hills.
- FROYLAN: That was really the beginning of the
restoration program and it didn't end there.
Right now we've got a capture on Elephant Mountain,
trying to remove 80 animals off of Elephant
and translocate them down to Black Gap.
The population there hasn't really blossomed
like it has at, at Elephant.
[radio chatter, helicopter whirs]
- ON RADIO: Got him, he's 12 o'clock.
- MAN: Great, that was a good shot.
- ON RADIO: Awesome.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[helicopter whirs]
[dramatic music]
- FROYLAN: So now they'll collect all the tissue samples:
blood, fecal, hair,
skin biopsy, nasal swab,
tonsil swab, checking for pathogens.
We try and learn as much as we can while we have ‘em here.
You're always keeping the animal's safety in mind,
animal welfare in mind.
- Last thing we want to do is take unhealthy animals
to a healthy population.
- FROYLAN: And we also radio collar the animals,
then we'll keep track of movements, mortalities,
habitat use.
The sheep are going to Black Gap,
borders right up against the U.S./Mexican border,
so a lot of these animals will likely go into Mexico
and so that's gonna allow us to identify those
very important travel corridors.
- BIOLOGIST: This guy ought to be on the landscape for
eight-plus years down at Black Gap,
so he's got a long life ahead of him.
- Let's go.
[metal trailer banging]
[dramatic music]
- It's because of man that, you know,
that these animals went extinct here in Texas.
So I think it's electively, you know, our duty to make sure
that they, that they're here, for one,
and that they persist here for future generations.
Black Gap Wildlife Management Area is part of a 3 million-acre
protected area along the U.S./Mexico border.
The canyons along the Rio Grande here are over 1,000 feet high
and some of the most beautiful and wild landscapes
in the world.
These bighorns are icons of that wildness.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
I've been asked, "What is success?"
You know, when will the restoration be done?
And in my opinion, it's never done.
There's still other places within the country,
even, you know, out of the country that require that.
That's how we started and once we get to that point,
it'll be our obligation to give back.
[dramatic music]