In 1941, biologists described Montana’s bighorn sheep population as endangered—decades before the Endangered Species Act. Today, the state has huntable populations and the biggest rams in the world. Here’s how they brought wild sheep back from the brink.
Rounding a bend beside a blue-ribbon trout stream in western Montana, I slam on the brakes. My kids look up from their devices. Standing square in front of us is the biggest live bighorn ram I’ve ever seen. He’s surrounded by lesser rams and ewes. His horns are the color of coffee, two creams. I stare and think it would be nice to hunt one of these big boys one day. Because there are too few sheep and too many hunters, the odds of me winning Powerball are better than drawing a permit to hunt them.
The mature ram is in no hurry. The herd parts just enough to let us pass, and it takes a while for the image of that big ram to shrink in the rearview. Encounters like this aren’t that rare, especially up this creek in the spring. But the road to get here, the road to wild, free-ranging, huntable populations of sheep in Montana, has been anything but smooth.
Disease, overhunting, habitat loss, and conflicts with domestic sheep are just a few of the barriers managers and bighorn sheep still struggle to overcome. Even so, Montana’s bighorn sheep population is a conservation success story. The population has gone from fewer than 1,000 animals in the 1940s to an estimated 5,700 sheep now, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP). And the state currently is growing the biggest rams in the world—big enough to entice some wealthy hunters to pay nearly half a million dollars just for the chance at taking a big one.
From Widespread to Nearly Dead
At their closest points, Russia and Alaska are barely 60 miles apart. Over the course of several ice ages, during periods when that stretch of sea between Asia and North America was frozen, the Bering Land Bridge provided easy access for Asian animal species to migrate into North America. Wild sheep first took advantage of the opportunity roughly 100,000 years ago and promptly began diversifying into various subspecies, including the Rocky Mountain bighorn.
In 1805, Meriwether Lewis recorded that one of his men first saw a bighorn in present-day North Dakota near the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. While in Montana, the expedition recorded 27 sightings of bighorns, mostly along those two rivers. Other explorers recorded sightings in the mountains, from Yellowstone National Park to Deer Lodge to Glacier National Park. One scientist from the 1920s estimated populations of bighorns in North America and Mexico to be anywhere from 1.5 to 2 million. An estimated 1,500 bighorns were in Glacier in 1916. By 1965, though, the population there had declined to just 180 animals. South of Glacier, in the Sun River drainage (home to one of the state’s largest populations of bighorns), biologists recorded periodic die-offs in 1925, 1927, 1932, and most recently in 1984. Other wild sheep populations across the entire state declined just as drastically. So, what happened?
With the opening of Montana’s frontier, pioneers, miners, cattle barons, and the like moved in, hoping for a better something. Much of the wild game was killed to feed those early workers and to ship back east to restaurants. Bighorns were squeezed out of their habitat, and noxious weeds invaded what little habitat they still had. Settlers moved domestic cattle and sheep onto the open range. And that’s where things went from bad to worse for the remaining wild bighorns.
Remember that land bridge? Some sheep—those of 4-H and merino wool fame—never crossed it. The sheep that remained evolved in Europe and Asia, along with the bacteria and viruses that cause pneumonia. While those sheep became immune to those pathogens, the bighorns that migrated didn’t evolve with the same pathogens. As a result, wild bighorns have no immunity. When domestic sheep and bighorns mingle, the pathogens are passed along, and wild bighorns lose big time. “The science is irrefutable that domestic sheep infect wild bighorns with pneumonia,” says Craig Fager, a veteran biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP).
New Bighorn Herds in the Tendoys
In 1997, Montana FWP managers reached out to the public and asked them what the future should look like for Montana’s bighorns. After receiving comments from hunters, hunting groups, and wildlife groups, biologists compiled a 300-page document outlining the past, present, and future of wild bighorn management in Montana. Every bighorn sheep population was accounted for. As regional managers and biologists come and go, that document is the guidebook they use to see that bighorn populations thrive. Managers find trends and learn what works and doesn’t work in a particular region. For example, take Fager’s region in southwest Montana near Dillon.
Wild sheep there have been on a roller coaster of reintroductions and die-offs since FWP reintroduced 39 sheep in 1985. By 1993, the herd was up to at least 154 animals. But that same winter, an all-age pneumonia die-off reduced the herd to 28 animals, and no lambs survived. More reintroductions followed, as did more die-offs. By February 2015, only 19 bighorns were spotted. That fall, Fager enlisted hunters as a tool to wipe out an entire wild herd in the remote Tendoy Mountains. The goal was to start fresh with a blank landscape and eventually restore disease-free sheep.
In February 2021, FWP released 26 bighorn sheep into the Tendoys. The 19 ewes, five rams, and two lambs were captured on Wild Horse Island on Flathead Lake, which has become the state’s sheep nursery for their relocation efforts. The hope is to increase sheep numbers to 150 in the mountain range.
It seems logical enough: take out sick sheep and replace them with healthy sheep. But there is a catch. There are still some private domestic sheep allotments nearby within range of roaming bighorns, which means wild sheep could once again become sick. “Private land flocks are an inherent risk of being in the bighorn business,” says Fager. “There is some risk around the Tendoys, but it’s as good as it’s going to get in terms of domestic flocks in the area.”
The Bozeman-based Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF) has a seat at the management table in Montana as well as nationally—wherever wild sheep roam. They support killing sheep to save sheep as long as there are long-term plans to transplant new sheep, the right sheep. “You want to transplant ‘round sheep’ into ‘round habitat,’ not ‘square sheep’ into ‘round habitat,’” says Kevin Hurley, WSF vice-president for conservation. “By that, we mean there needs to be careful evaluation and analysis of source stock to target habitat.”
Montana Sheep Recovery and Restoration
As for the rest of Montana, the story of the Tendoy herd isn’t an anomaly. By the end of 2010, pneumonia in five western Montana herds had killed 640 wild sheep—more than 10 percent of the state’s entire bighorn population. With so many die-offs, Montana is fortunate to have healthy seed populations of sheep in places like Wild Horse Island, which was the home of the current world’s record bighorn.
Trapping and relocating animals to other locations in Montana and beyond is nothing new for wildlife managers. In fact, species like elk were hunted to near extinction in the early 1900s, with only a handful left in Yellowstone National Park. With protection from the government and proper habitat, the herd grew so well that thousands of elk were relocated throughout Montana and the entire nation.
As for bighorns, biologists in Montana have worked to trap and relocate sheep to suitable habitat since the early 1940s. The early years, though, came with a steep learning curve. Most captured sheep simply dispersed from the release site and died. A couple of decades spent refining the capture and relocation techniques has boosted sheep survival after restoration.
Today, sheep capture and relocation is a sight to behold, with net-gunners leaning out of a helicopter that maneuvers to track manic sheep. Once caught, sheep are secured, tethered together, and stacked five high underneath the helicopter for transport. Many sheep are fitted with radio collars so biologists can track their movement. None of this comes cheap—not the disease studies and research, the tracking collars, the biologists, nor the helicopters at $1,500 per hour. And all of that money comes from sportsmen and women in the form of license dollars and taxes on shooting equipment, the latter thanks to federal legislation in 1937 that established the Pittman-Robertson Act.
In addition, Montana’s bighorn research and restoration get a big shot of money every year from the Governor’s sheep tag. Hunters like myself wait decades to draw a sheep tag, but there’s a way to get to the head of the line. Every year since 1986, one hunter forks over big money at a Wild Sheep Foundation auction for a permit that will allow them to hunt in any area in the state. To date, the sale of that auction tag has raised more than $7.6 million ($8.3 million as of 2023) for sheep restoration efforts like those in the Tendoys.
To read more about where this money goes and who buys these tags, you’ll want to read Big Horns, Big Money.
Hunters across the country are keyed in on Montana’s sheep populations because it has the biggest bighorn rams in the world. Consider this: 11 out of the top 20 Boone and Crockett rams were killed in Montana. The rest, except two, were killed in Alberta. Montana’s behemoth bighorn rams roam the crumbling clay breaks country of the Missouri River in eastern Montana—the same country where members of the Lewis and Clark expedition first saw them. These sheep there are transplants, too. A poacher killed the last wild sheep in the breaks in 1916. Since 1947, managers have been supplementing the breaks country with wild bighorns, first from Colorado and most recently from the Sun River and the National Bison Range in western Montana.
As for those sheep my kids and I spotted along that blue-ribbon trout stream, they’ve seen their share of despair and disease. In 2012, a truck driver plowed through the herd, killing seven lambs, a full third of the lamb population from that year. This was right on the heels of a pneumonia outbreak in which FWP wardens had to cull 19 sheep. That left maybe 60 animals. Now there might be around 100.
For a few years, managers halted hunting there to help the herd recover. In 2020, FWP issued one tag for the area. Even so, hundreds of hunters put their name in to draw a tag. Odds of drawing are typically less than half a percent. The odds are equally dismal in the eastern half of the state. In a place like the Missouri River Breaks, one unit saw more than 3,000 hunters put in for 10 tags. I don’t bother to apply at all, even with a herd 30 minutes from my door. Perhaps one day, my kids will bring their kids up here to kill a summer afternoon. With tag draw odds like they are, it certainly won’t be to kill a ram. Even so, it’s nice to know that hunters help fund the restoration of these animals so all of us, hunters and nonhunters alike, can enjoy having them around.
*A version of this article originally appeared in Big Sky Journal. This article was last updated in April 2023.
