Last weekend, Ryan trekked back into the mountains with Crystal Barnes, the park’s keen-eyed raptor surveyor, for another survey in bighorn territory. They didn’t spot any sheep on that trip, but surveys throughout the year revealed that 85 bighorns were using the park. Last year, our project coordinator, Ryan, headed into the field with a bighorn crew to search for signs of sheep near Yosemite’s eastern edge, where another herd had been reintroduced in the 1980s. Throughout 2016, scientists are continuing to monitor the herd using ground surveys and thousands of GPS data points. Last fall, they confirmed that two lambs had been born surveys earlier this spring revealed that the herd and its pair of yearlings had survived the harsh high-elevation winter. Over the past 15 months, experts from the National Park Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife have kept a close eye on the Cathedral Range herd. A Yosemite Nature Notes video captured the momentous occasion, as biologists watched ewes emerge from the transport crates and spring off into the rocky cliffs of their ancestral home - the first bounding steps on a path toward establishing a self-sustaining population of bighorn in the heart of Yosemite’s Wilderness.
Last March, through a multiagency operation supported by our donors, a herd of the endangered mammals was helicoptered in from other parts of the Sierra. It’s been a little over a year since biologists released Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep into Yosemite’s Cathedral Range, marking the return of the species to its historical habitat for the first time in more than 100 years.
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