Thanks to conservation efforts, there’s been some good news of late when it comes to Southern California’s population of bighorn sheep.
After years of declines, herds in Joshua Tree National Park and in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park have stabilized and even started to grow a bit, noted James Cornett, a Palm Springs-based ecologist and author who’s taught a course on bighorn sheep at UC Riverside. And in his own backyard, in the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, Cornett said the sheep with distinctive curved horns “are holding their own, up from less than one hundred to a few hundred today.”
But in each of those areas, Cornett said there still are fewer than a 1,000 sheep left. That’s partially a consequence of human behavior, such as introducing livestock that carry diseases and fragmenting sheep habitat with highways and other development. It’s also a consequence of climate change, Cornett said, with the West’s megadrought particularly hard on small, vulnerable populations like bighorn sheep.
