Moore Outdoors With Chester Moore 01/17/25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to More Outdoors on News Top five sixty k
lv I. This is Chester Moore and I'm super excited
to have my friend Kevin Hurley. He is vice president
of Conservation with the Wild Sheep Foundation, and Wild Sheep
Foundation just released the Conservation Impact Document that details their
granted aid projects doing all kinds of conservation work for

(00:23):
wild sheeap around the country.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
So welcome to the program. Kevin.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Yeah, thanks, good morning, Chester.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
We were just together it seemed like yesterday, but a
couple of weeks ago at this point in Alpine, Texas
and then El Paso for sort of one of the
highlights of this conservation Impact document the restoration of desert
big horns of the Franklin Mountains.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
It was only two weeks ago, but it seems a
whole lot longer ago than that. We have a standing
joke that as as the sheep world turns, it turns rapidly.
I like it. I like it.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
So this program has been something that's.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Sort of been in the works for a long time
where the Franklin Mountains that literally are in the city
of El Paso haven't had desert big horns for over
one hundred years. A great area to restore populations from
Elephant Mountain Wildlife Management Area. But this this was really
if a crucial timing on this because of something that

(01:19):
hit Texas a few years ago. We're gonna be talking
about this and other project. Let's talk about get it
out of the way. Micae Plasma ovineumonia. Yeah, let's talk
a little bit about that and how that impacts wild cheap.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
That's a mouthful. Michael or m OV is the acronym
everybody uses our abbreviation, and so basically it's a respiratory
bacterium that the first thing it does is it compromises
the little beating hair cecilia in an animal's windpipe, whether

(01:55):
it's a human or a bighorn shape or whatever. And
so when those sillia, those little hairs are beating up,
you know, that's when you know and I could you
cough up if we had some cooties and some something
we had to get rid of. But MOV tends to
compromise those sillia, and so it affects any other pathogens

(02:17):
that can get in and into the air way. They
don't have that defense mechanism, and so a lot of times,
you know when a while like bat does a knee
cropsy on a dead big orange sheep, they'll open it
up and look at the lungs, and they might refer
to the consolidation in the in the lungs as fifteen
percent or forty percent or seventy five percent consolidated. And

(02:40):
basically what that means is all the fluids and all
the junk that goes into the into the lungs, they
can't get it out, and so unfortunately those animals sadly
die of their own bodily fluids. They basically drowned. And
so it's a it's a real issue in wild sheep
conservation around the West.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
And it is believed to be the main reason that
wild sheep numbers, especially big one populations went down dramatically
from the eighteen hundreds until like up to the nineteen
fifties before recovery kind of began.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
It is, you know, and if you look at early
guestimates and early maps that showed where mountain sheep occurred
in the western US and Canada and Mexico prior to
eighteen fifty, it was pretty incredible, you know, really widespread distribution.
And back then, of course, nobody had any ability to

(03:37):
fly or you know, conduct periodic surveys or systematic surveys
come up with a population estimate. So there was an
early naturalist, Ernest Thompson Thompson Seaton that published a series
of books in nineteen twenty eight called The Lives of
Game Animals and his Best Guestimate, and that clearly is
what it was. He figured there was one and a

(04:00):
half to two million big own sheep in the West. Well,
you know, nobody can validate that number, and it was
the seat of his levi's back then that he made
that estimate. But suffice it to say, wild cheap numbers
in the western US decreased dramatically, so that by the

(04:24):
nineteen fifties there was an estimated fifteen to seventeen thousand
left in the Western States. So that's an even if
Seaton's estimate of one and a half million was close
to correct, that was a ninety nine percent reduction down
to fifteen thousand, and so whether it was a ninety

(04:46):
eight or a ninety seven or a ninety five percent decline,
it was a dramatic decline and reduction in wild sheep
numbers and distribution across the West. Prior to what I
would call Europeans settlement opening up the West, early mountain
and early explorers, railroad crews, all the folks that came west,

(05:08):
and with them they brought their livestock. Obviously they needed
that and you know, for not only ranching for themselves,
but also meat for these railroad crews. And you know,
you had to feed an army of hungry railroad workers.
And so there was some unlimited hunting. You know, back then,

(05:29):
it wasn't hunting, it was subsistence, and so you know,
mountain sheep are very tasty, and so there was unregulated
take back then. And there were also large predators, you know,
that roamed the landscape, and they certainly co evolved with sheep,
and they knew how to take a sheep if they

(05:50):
could get it. Mountain lions, maybe, coyotes on lambs, golden
eagles on lambs, wolves in some places, grizzlies in other places.
But with the introduction of domestic livestock, particularly domestic sheep
or grazing, you know, these some of these respiratory bacteria

(06:11):
are I won't say endemic, but they're they're pretty ubiquitous
in domestic sheep, and obviously their industry and their producers
deal with their challenges weight gain shipping fever some people
call it, but you know, they've been able to manage

(06:31):
that in their industry. But my analogy says, similar to
some of the pathogens that European settlers brought to Native
Americans in the West, smallpox, cholera, things like that that
they had no natural resistance to. I think it's pretty
analogous to the situation with domestic sheep and whatever pathogen

(06:55):
load they brought with them and introduced some of those
too naive bighorn sheep in the West.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, and Texas had got its population back up, Texas
being on the eastern fringe of desert big Horn range
late eighteen hundreds estimates maybe fifteen hundred to two thousand,
and in twenty nineteen it was around fifteen hundred or so.
And then we had a disease event. But this disease

(07:23):
event seems to be a little bit different because of
the cause of the disease. What transferred to them a
non indigenous animal called the awdad or the barbary sheep,
which was actually stocked in Texas in the nineteen fifties
for hunting purposes and this has kind of created a
crucial situation for desert big horns.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
It has. And so if you look at the Texas
desert big horn numbers through time, you know their numbers
and distribution shrenk and so I think, you know, maybe
they were pretty much eliminated extra paint from West Texas yep.
And then starting maybe in the fifties and sixties, with
you know, some captive breeding facilities and some propagation facilities

(08:09):
that Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in the Texas Big
Own Society and private landowners ranchers in West Texas worked
collaboratively to have enough sheep to put back on the landscape.
And as you said, between say, just take an arbitrary
number of nineteen sixty till twenty nineteen, West Texas had

(08:30):
increased its desert big win populations to maybe add or
above their historic highs, you know, fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred,
whatever the right number was, and now unfortunately it's down
around maybe five to six hundred left. And so I
think some of the evaluations that have gone on in

(08:54):
other Western states and provinces have said, you know that
this contact with domestic sheep and then if you get
infected big horns coming in contact with naive bighorns. There's
also the pathogen transmission risk. But odd AD seemed to
be implicated pretty significantly in the West Texas situation. As

(09:16):
you said, you know, and we can't we can't criticize
folks fifty sixty years ago. They did the best thing,
and so TPWD when they brought ODDAD into Texas, I
think in Paladero Canyon introduced them there. Well, if they
could put that genie back in the bottle now, they
probably would. It's you know, that genie's been out for

(09:39):
six decades and the numbers I keep here in is
maybe there are twenty thousand odd AD in the transpenkos
and statewide. I don't know how many.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
When we come back, we'll talk more with Kevin Hurley
from the Wild Sheep Foundation about Texas bighorns and more
here on More Outdoors on These Talk five sixty klv I.
Welcome back to More Outdoors on These Talk five sixty
k LVI. This is Chester Moore continuing our conversation with
Kevin Hurley from the Wild Sheep Foundation.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
The Wild Cheap Foundation, Texas Biggorns Society, and others have
helped fund some research into looking at, well, what pathogens
do odd AD carrey and is there a risk there?
And so some work at Texas A and M by
doctor Walt Cook, a longtime colleague of mine from when
his days in Wyoming when I worked for Wyoming Game

(10:32):
and Fish, and his graduate student Logan Thomas. They looked
at Colemingland situations where they had some odd Ad and
some desert bighorn in captivity and not right on top
of each other, but separated. Well, it seems like they
shared a water source, maybe there was a creek or

(10:53):
some drainage that went through. And so a lot of
work since then looking at is that the athogen transfer passway,
is it through water is whatever? But the thing with
thought ad kind of like domestic sheep. Maybe they've had
MV or similar pathogens and they've adapted to them, so

(11:15):
it's present, but it doesn't really, you know, crush their populations.
But when that's introduced to a naive population of desert
big ones, say it Black Gap or somewhere in Texas, yeah, boom,
things you know start tipping over. And so it's been
tragic to watch the climb back to add or above
historic numbers, and then, like you said, in the last

(11:37):
five years, numbers have dropped like a rock from historic
highs down to five hundred or fewer.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, and this is where the Wild Cheap Foundation, Texas
Big Horns Society, collaborating the Texas Parks and Wildlife and
other groups we're going to talk about come together. Elephant Mountain,
Wildlife and an instrument area in your alpine is sort
of the epicenter of the Texas Desert Big One program.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
It was believed that it's a clean herd in terms.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
Of disease, and there was going to capture happened two
weeks ago to take animals from there and transfer them
into the Franklin Mountains in El Paso, which Parks and
Wallace says are odd Dad free. But let's talk now
about what wild Sheet Foundation does, what kind of support
I know, financially, but otherwise, how does wild Sheet Foundation
get involved in a project like this.

Speaker 3 (12:25):
Well, let me get to that in a second. But
one thing I do want to note in the Texas
scenario is Elephant Mountain has been like you said, these
sources of the go to population for TPWD and TBS
and others to work on transplants, and so I always
call my brother from a different mother. But Clay Brewer,
he was the head of the there's a bigg Round

(12:46):
program for TPWD in West Texas for long time, and
so he and I worked on a collaborative collection of
all the transplant information in the Western States and provinces.
Started that in nineteen ninety six and Clai finished it
in twenty fifteen. It's a really cool document that says
where have we moved sheep? And so we did a

(13:10):
jurisdictional or jurisdiction by jurisdiction, we said what did you
get from somewhere else? What did you give away in
terms of sheep to elsewhere, and what did you do
at home? So we've got a really good publication printed
in twenty fifteen, and as soon as it was printed
it became obsolete because of continuing transports. But as we

(13:32):
drove from Olpaso to Alpine, I had a couple guys
with me. We'll talk about in a minute, but I
had them. I printed some pages for them, and basically,
in Texas's history up till twenty fifteen, there had been
twenty imports of desert sheep totally fifty one head from Arizona, Nevada, Utah,

(13:59):
different source pots, populations to help Texas get back on
their feet. And then I think there were about thirty
one transplants done within Texas again to restore sheep to
those historic habitats that were still suitable. And so in aggregate,
I think fifty one transplants that Texas was involved with

(14:20):
moved about eight hundred or so sheep over a long
period of time forty years or so. So but that's
you know, Texas has a good record. And with Texas
being ninety seven percent private land, you know, large landowners,
big ranches there, it had to be collaborative and so

(14:40):
TPWD and Texas Big Owners Society, Clay Brewer when he
was doing it, and Freila and Hernandez now you know,
got to work with those private landowners, good relations, try
and get this done. But in this case, with Franklin
Mountains being a state park, it was within Texas Parks
and wildlifees umbrella so to speak. So their Wildlife Division

(15:03):
work with the parks folks and got this transplant set up.
It was a long time coming due to some challenges,
but anyway, that's just an example of a really well
designed long term It seems like it takes forever to
get to where you release the sheep out the back
of a trailer, but it was a good example of

(15:24):
a collaborative project involving a lot of moving parts. And
so the Wild Cheap Foundation we've had a history of that.
We're coming up on our forty eighth year of existence.
We've actually been in existence since nineteen seventy four, but
we were incorporated in nineteen seventy seven, So we're coming

(15:45):
up on our forty eighth convention here in Reno in
mid January of twenty five. But you know, our mission
and our motto, our purpose is all about putting and
keeping more wild sheep on the mountain. That's what we're
all about. And so annually we get a cavalcade of

(16:06):
requests for conservation projects. It might be water development, it
might be prescribed burning, it might be noxious weed treatments.
It might be telemetry, coloring, disease surveillance, land protection, land
acquisition easements, you name it. There's a whole spectrum of
kinds of conservation projects that we receive every July, and

(16:29):
then we spend much of July excuse me much of
August reviewing those and then advancing recommendations to our Board
of Directors for approval. And so by August twenty ninth
of this year, we had twenty two projects totally one
point six million dollars that were approved by our board

(16:53):
and as involved not only the state and provincial Fish
and Wildlife agencies, might be federal land management agencies like
the Bord Service or the Bureau of Land Management. It
might be university researchers. It might be consultants, it might
be tribes, it might be First Nations in Canada. Again,

(17:13):
a whole spectrum of the kind of projects that we fund,
and you know they're not all trap and transplant, sure,
a lot of other different categories. And so this is
just a great example of a project that maybe the
biggest one that Wild Chief Foundation ever committed to, lightly
over three hundred thousand dollars, and we had great partnerships

(17:36):
that helped us meet that obligation.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
Sure, let's talk about those.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Let's talk about some of those partners because I got
to meet a few of those guys out there, representatives
and it's always exciting to see the money come in
for a project, but also kind of see the heart
behind it and what these different partners want to bring
to the table.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Well exactly. You know a lot of people it's kind
of like Heaven. I've never been there. I hope to
get there some Well, a lot of people have that
same aspiration about well maybe someday I might hunt a sheep.
Well here's a chance to help volunteer and lay hands
on one and help maybe put a radio collar on her,
hold them still while I vet takes a blood drawer,

(18:17):
you know, attaches a radio collar or something like that.
So we had great support. Of course, Texas Bighorns Society
or TBS as I keep referring to. It was instrumental
working side by side with TPWD to get this thing going.
It was a long I always joke about a long
gestation period. And doctor Sam Cunningham, the president of Texas

(18:40):
Biggrown Society here he's a hear, nose and throat doc
in Amarilla. But if he was expecting father handing out cigars,
it'd be like, this is a two year gestation period
to get this baby delivered. Here's a big cigar. But
TBS was huge in their leadership and so we worked
with TBS as one of our thirty or so chapters

(19:02):
in affiliates the Wild Chief Foundation has scattered around North
America and beyond, and so Texas Bigger Own Society and
Texas Park's and Wildlife Department made this request to us,
and we said, oh, man, yeah, this is a great
You know, some people referred to it as sort of
the last chance or last gasp, the desert cheap in

(19:25):
West Texas, and we certainly hope that's not the case.
But it was a well thought out project that appealed
to us because it was releasing desert big horn moving
them from Elephant Mountain over to Franklin Mountain State Park
where it was odd ed free, where it was livestock
free in a state park.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
When we come back on More Outdoors, we're talking more
with Kevin Hurley of the Wild Sheep Foundation about the
transplant of desert big Horns into Franklin Mountain State Park
in El Paso, Texas. Here More Outdoors. Welcome back to
More Outdoors on News Top five sixty kl the This
is Chester More. Download the program via the iHeartRadio app.

(20:08):
More Outdoors archives going back several years, continuing our conversation
with Kevin Hurley, of the Wild Cheap Foundation.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
Then we would go work with some of our partners
to get the funding to help make this happen on
the ground. And so aside from TBS, the number one
partner we had was past pro Shopping Cabella's Outdoor Fund.
We've had a long positive relationship with Bella's Outdoor Fund.
I think over the last six years they've they've provided

(20:37):
over six hundred thousand US to us to the Wild
Cheap Foundation for a dozen or more projects from British
Columbia down to south West Texas. And so Cabella's Outdoor
Fund was able to send a couple of their videographers
out and I think those guys went home wishing they'd

(20:57):
brought more storage, more prodible hard drives, because they got
a ton of footage and we're real anxious to see
how that looks. I'm sure they're still unwanted dealing with
all that footage that they captured. But our Midwest Chapter
based in the Twin Cities. You know, there's no big
Own Cheap in Minneapolis Saint Paul, but there's a lot

(21:20):
of wild chief conservationists there and so the Midwest Chapter
was a great partner in helping with this, and they
were not able to send anybody there to help on
the actual operation. But another one was the Campfire Conservation
on Campfire Conservation Fund of America. They're, you know, based

(21:43):
in Upstate New York and a lot of these are
I had a chance, maybe a decade ago to go
back to Upstate New York. They hosted a meeting there
at their facility, and I mean they have an outdoor bar,
and this is the same bar called the Prairie Dog Saloon.
It's the same bar that you know Teddy Roosevelt leaned

(22:05):
his elbow on, and Gifford Pinchot and some of those
early conservationists, you know, the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts,
you know, wealthy families along the Hudson River that were
really the birthplace of the North American conservation movement. And
so they were able to send two of their conservation

(22:25):
committee reps, John Warden, Parker Corbin out and I picked
them up in a passo and drove them over and
they spent three days, you know, immersed in a great project.
And coincidentally, last night, which would have been Wednesday, the eighteenth,
they presented to their conservation committee sort of a download

(22:46):
of what went on, and the feedback I've already gotten
this morning is the Campfire Conservation Committee was thrilled with
that presentation and their participation. So, you know, those are
some of the major, the larger partners that we got.
But I mean there's a whole litany of everybody from

(23:07):
the Water for While I Foundation based in Land of
Wyoming where I used to work. They helped with some
funding for guzzlers that put in over Saint Patting's Day weekend,
and our Eastern chapter, the Wild Chief Foundation based in Lancaster,
PA of all places. Again wildcheap conservationists lived there, and

(23:28):
they raise money locally and help invest it in Western
projects so that there are sheep on the mountain and
so and then we had Houston Safari Club. Joe Vitar
and his folks helped on this project as well. So
I mean, there's a laundry list of cooperators on this
particular project. But to us, it just it takes a

(23:52):
whole bunch of folks working together to get something like
this not only planned but pulled off. And congrats to
TPWD and.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
T absolutely and that's really the heart of what I
wanted to talk about with this that this is a
lot of people coming together for a conservation cause. A
lot of different ways people get skin in the game
to do something positive for wild sheep, but we're talking
about this conservation impact. There's a document can get a
Wild Cheap Foundation dot or I'll put the links up

(24:20):
where they can download the pdf. The document will learn
more about the Wild Cheap Foundation also its chapters in
affiliate it's like the Texas Big ORNs Society. Incidentally, the
first conservation group I ever joined, when I was nineteen
years old, was the Texas Big Orn Society. I was
at an event. I did not know they had a
society for Texas bighorns at nineteen and I see a

(24:41):
full body big horn and it says Texas Big Orn Society.
So nineteen year old me, it was like a moth
to flame and who would have thunk, you know, years
later getting to just see all this sort of happen,
which is which is a beautiful thing. Back then it
was the Wild Cheap Foundation was the foundation for North
American wild sheep. And that's a mouthful, but you know,

(25:01):
Wild Sheep Foundation continues. That's the legacy that's the Wild
Sheep Foundation. You said, it's forty eighth year.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
Forty Yeah, so you know, the story goes finas is
the acronym foundation from the American Wild Sheep. But people said,
what's the finas well? Back in the story, I always
heard on a snowy weekend in February of nineteen seventy four,
a bunch of experienced sheep hunters from the Michigan I'm sorry, Minnesota, Wisconsin,

(25:31):
and Iowa area got together at somebody's cabin for a
weekend gather and you know, they each put one hundred
bucks on the table and said, we ought to do
something for wild sheep because they don't they don't pay
their own way. And by that I'll explain that. But
ten or twelve founders, you know, said we need to

(25:53):
do something like Ducks Unlimited, but for mountain sheep. So
that was the origin of the Foundation for North American
Wild Sheep. And of course, forty eight years later, coming
up on our fiftieth in a couple of years, some
of those original founders are still alive up there in years,
but we're going to focus and feature on them and

(26:14):
thank them for their vision fifty years ago. But you
know to me one of the interesting parts. And I've
only been only I've only been involved with the Sheep
Foundation forty five years, and so only forty five I
missed the first five years. I got involved in the
fall of eighty one and they helped find my graduate

(26:39):
work at the University of Wyoming on a sheet project
between Cody, Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park. They moved their
office from the Twin Cities to Cody, Wyoming in September
of eighty two, so I helped move the boxes, unload
the boxes for the first Bana's office. And then, after
thirty years with the State of Woming Gave and Fish Department,
I took one night in retirement, went back to work

(27:01):
the next morning, knocking on the door of the Sheep
Foundation at seven am because I didn't have a key
to get in. And it's like, what time do you
people get to work? Let's go, And so they showed
up about quarter to eight and said, you know, can
we help you? And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to
work here. But I knew them all so but it's
been a great organization. You know, our membership right now

(27:23):
is plus or minus either side of eleven thousand. It's
not a lot of members. You know, you look at
say Ducks Unlimited, I mean millions of members globally, something
like the Rocky Mountain OK Foundation. I joined the first
year it came out in nineteen eighty four, but Army
f has done great work for elk and their habitats

(27:43):
for forty years. But the Sheep Foundation, what's really unique.
We have such an incredible, dedicated and generous membership, some
of whom have never and may never get a chance
to hunt a sheep, but they still do, you know,
provide their blood, sweat and tears, as Grey Thornton says,

(28:05):
you know, their time, their treasure, their talent in the
interest of wild cheap conservation. And that's what's really gratifying
to me is the level of commitment that our members have,
even though you know they may pass this earth and
never have gotten a chance to hunt a sheep, which
is a big aspiration for a lot of people. So

(28:27):
it's it's a really cool bunch of people. And I've
got all kinds of anecdotes and why I'm such a
lifer for forty five years with the foundation and various capacities,
but it's it's just a great group that's really focused.
You know, remember the old you know, mile wide, inch deep.

(28:48):
We're an inch wide and a mile deep. We are
focused on wild sheep and their populations and their habitats.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
And one of the things I like in terms of
covering all of this it's the versity of projects they're supported.
So you go from a translocation in Texas to another
location in Texas, very important, historical, and then you got
really cutting edg stuff like working with Working Dogs for Conservation.
Can you talk a little bit about that project?

Speaker 3 (29:15):
Yeah? And so Working Dogs for Conservation they have a
great website, they have a great team. They have a
field station just ten twelve miles east of Missoula, Montana.
But you can find information on their website Working Dogs
for Conservation. But they've got a staff of maybe twenty
people and maybe forty five dogs. And these are not

(29:39):
special breeds or especially trained. These are pound puppies, rescue
dogs that were problematic for somebody else. But they've got
really good dog handlers, dog trainers.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
When we come back, we'll talk more about Working Dogs
for Conservation and Wild sheep with Kevin Hurley of the
Wild Sheep Foundation. Welcome back to More Outdoors on News
Top five to sixty klv I wrapping up our conversation
with Kevin Hurley of the Wild Sheep Foundation.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
Doctor Pete Coppolilo, who's the execut director there and his staff.
They work on a variety of conservation projects and it
might be everything from chronic wasting disease detection to you know,
port duty where they're looking for invasive weed seeds might
come in in a palette of you know, produce imported

(30:33):
from Africa or somewhere. They do all kinds of work.
But what we've worked with them on the last five
years is can these dogs be trained to detect michael
plasma over them on the mv scent residue smell either
in peco pellets from a captured sheep or maybe they

(30:57):
find some on a landscape. They don't know which sheep
positive them, but can they detect that? And what seems
to be the evolution of the diagnostics is it's better
on nasal swabs, you know, so take it basically they're
a big Q tip and run it around the inside

(31:17):
of a big orange nose and then they can set
up trials where the dogs have you know, eight or
so canisters to choose from, and they've got all kinds
of cool videos on their website and I just saw
another cool one yesterday. But they'll prial these dogs to
see which which of the canisters they detect on, and

(31:42):
then the term is alert, you know, which they hit
on or start wagging their tail. But they'll go to
this circular sense station with maybe eight canisters on it,
and maybe there's some empties or there's some dummy or rogue,
you know, decoy type sense. But if they can zero
in on the one that's got a swab that's positive

(32:04):
for MOV, those dogs will sit down and just alert
and I mean they're just like hyped up, ready to go.
And so there's some really cool footage on the Working
Dogs website, but it's it's amazing. I mean, most people
are dog lovers, and what dogs can sense and smell
and detect buy outpaces anything we can come up with.

(32:28):
And so what we've done is, I think in partnership
with Working Dogs for Conservation in our state and provincial
and tribal First Nation partners around the West, is Working
Dogs is getting more and more samples that they can
train the dogs on. And I think the three best
dogs their detection rate or MOV off of a diluted,

(32:53):
you know, diminished nasal swab sample. Their best dog is
hitting at one hundred percent detection. I think their second
best dog is in that ninety two to ninety three
percent accuracy range, and the third dogs in the eighty
five to eighty seven percent range. So it's not foolproof,
but these dogs can alert and detect the presence of

(33:17):
this pathogen. Well, how does that translate to an on
the ground situation? And I'll go back a couple of
years to Todd Norden in Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.
We had the working Dogs folks come with their dog
to a capture in the Panhandle of Nebraska. We also

(33:38):
had doctor Kate Hibert from Washington State University who's are
Wild Cheap Disease Research Chair that wazoo. She came with
a field PCR unit called a biomeme. And what we
were really interested in, what we talked about possibly deploying
in Texas two weeks ago, would help a manage make

(34:00):
a real time decision like Okay, we're gonna draw blood,
We're gonna take nasal swabs and in fact, Texas wound
up flying thirty or more samples on day one from Alpine.
Texas tried to get them to Pullman, Washington, but couldn't
land there because a low cloud cover. Had to land
in Lewiston, Idaho, and have somebody drive down from the

(34:21):
university and drive the samples back up. But what it
would do is help a manager make a field real
time decision that says, okay, according to the biome unit
the field PCR, we have indications that that you you
number three or you number eight maybe positive. If the
dogs alert and detect on that, maybe there's a way

(34:44):
to stratify that and say, well, this one's for sure
gonna have it. Handing the laboratory results from the Washington
Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab or wattle up in Pullman, and
so the dogs can help with a field decision. What
do we do. Do we turn that sheep back on

(35:04):
the mountain, do we put that one in a different trailer?
Do we plan to take them to captivity? And in
some cases there's been positive sheep that have big hornes
that have been euthanized down right then. But in the
in the Texas case, two weeks ago, those first thirty
plus samples were all negative, and so TPWD and TVs

(35:29):
went forward and we all mobilized from Elephant Mountain, going
down to the Interstate ten to Olpasso and Freuilin and
Hernandez got the call from Wattle that's a green light.
These are all clear, all negative, and so, you know,
really a great feeling to know that these were all clean.
If there had been odd ed contact on or near

(35:53):
Elephant Mountain, at least in the shape that were caught,
they hadn't transmitted that pathogen yet, and so I know
there was a real sense of urgency on the part
of TPWD and TBS. It's like the whole point of
the Franklin Mountains was to get a second source population established.
You know the old adage don't put all your eggs

(36:15):
in one basket. Well, if if your basket is Elephant
Mountain and somehow that's been your source for decades and
then it's unavailable because of contamination or disease infection problems,
they really wanted to get a second herd started at
Franklin Mountains. That's MV free and so moving seventy seven cheap,

(36:37):
and those females were all ultrasounded and I think five
out of six, you know, eighty four percent, And I
believe there was forty u's total and thirty seven rams,
so you know, forty of the US. Do the math,
you know what's eighty four percent of that? But I
mean there's going to be some babies hitting the ground
in the next couple of months at Franklin Mountain State Park.

(37:00):
So it was a really good effort. But working dogs
has played a great role, not only in the Nebraska situation,
not necessarily in the Texas, but it helps the decision
makers make an informed decision at the time of we've
got sheep in hand, sheep in the trailer, Now what
do we.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Do with them.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
Another project we want to talk about, because water is
a recurring role in desert big horn sheep populations, is
the Muddy Mountains project. This is in the Conservation Impact document,
and you know it seems to be a crucial.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Area in that for desert big horns.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
And let's talk about the water catchment situation in general,
and then how this particular one of the Muddy Mountains
may have a really positive impact for many years.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Well just you know, if you look at there's at
least seven southwestern states that have desert bighorn sheep and
so California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado in the very
southwest corner Utah, Nevada, of course, and then all the

(38:06):
way into Mexico. Six states in Mexico. And so water
in the desert is very important and it's it's helped
recover desert bigger on populations in many of those jurisdictions.
And so again with our network of chapters and affiliates,
the Wild Cheap Foundation works closely with a lot of

(38:28):
our chapters affiliates partners on those southwestern US projects. But I'm,
you know, from Wyoming, and so I remember we did
guzzler projects in Wyoming and people would think, boy, do
you really need water development there? Yeah, Wyoming is high, desert, cold,
but you know, the need is still there. There. Can

(38:48):
talk about guzzler projects in British Columbia, well, why God,
there's all kinds of snow and water in BC. Why
But the point is water development can help drive population
dynamics of a wild sheep population, whether it's a desert
or a rocky or California or some other subspecies.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
If you would like to get more information on how
you can get involved with the Wild Sheep Foundation, go
to Wildshepfoundation dot org. I'm a proud member also in
Texas to Texas Bighorn Society, great organization. Wild Sheep are
very important to me on a personal level, but they're
also very important to the legacy of wildlife in North America.

(39:34):
You know, I've been doing More Outdoors for twenty five years,
and I'm grateful for everyone who ever listened to this program.
Thank you so much for supporting all the work that
I've done, all the work I do. Thank you for
listening to More Outdoors all of these years. You can
follow me at the chesterom A're on Instagram, Higher Calling
dot net my blog. Also catch my Dark Outdoors podcast.

(39:57):
God bless and have a great out there doors weekend