Badlands Bighorn

Wild sheep east of the Rocky Mountains

Bighorn sheep are wild sheep that live mostly in mountains and sometimes in deserts and other dry regions of western North America. Both male and female animals have horns, although those of females are much smaller and do not twist like males, but protrude backwards like a saber.

The bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) is a species belonging to the genus of sheep (Ovis) heard. Zoologists distinguish between various subspecies of bighorn sheep; the exact number is controversial. In 1913, the English naturalist Richard Lydekker assumed at least 16 subspecies, while the Canadian zoologist Ian McTaggart Cowan in 1940 assumed only seven subspecies based on skull measurements, one of which is the Badlands bighorn.

The Badlands bighorn, its name in English Badlands Bighorn is not, as its name suggests, only inhabiting the badlands in Dakota, but rather a larger area that also includes Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and South and North Dakota. On the whole you can say, the Badlands bighorn lived in the northern Great Plains, an arid area east of the Rocky Mountains.

From the Montana Bighorn Sheep Conservation Strategy (2010), published by the organization Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (Montana FWP), it appears that it was not easy for early taxonomists to prove the existence of Badlands bighorns as a subspecies. We know of the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who first encountered Badlands bighornen on the Missouri River and in the Badlands of North and South Dakota during the Lewis and Clark Expedition to expand the United States to the West Coast in 1805.

Almost 100 years later In 1901, American zoologist C. Hart Merriam described the eastern population of bighorn sheep as Ovis canadensis auduboni and used the specific epithet to honor the American ornithologist and illustrator John James Audubon, who also encountered bighorn sheep in the 1830s. Merriam’s type specimen was a young adult male from South Dakota that was shot in 1855.

Badlands bighorn – fact sheet

alternative names	Badlands bighorn sheep, Audubon’s bighorn, Audubon’s bighorn sheep
scientific names	Ovis canadensis auduboni, (Ovis canadensis canadensis)
original distribution area	Great Plains, North America
Time of extinction	between 1900 and 1925
Causes of extinction	Hunting, loss of habitat, diseases

The settlement of the Great Plains—The beginning of the end

The Badlands bighorn extinction is a “strange example of an animal experiencing suffering because of its ability to survive in the most desolate and hostile environment,” wrote David Day in 1983 The Doomsday Book of Animals and what he means to say is that the Great Plains and ultimately even the Badlands, as truly inhospitable habitats, could not offer sufficient protection to the sheep.

For a long time there were hardly any people living in the Great Plains The area was considered a wasteland due to the drought that prevailed there. Only semi-nomadic Indian peoples roamed the landscape hunting bison. When horses finally came to America by Europeans in the 18th century, the indigenous population had the chance to populate the prairie more densely. The Plains Indians emerged who followed wild cattle across the prairie to hunt them. But indigenous peoples not only hunted bison, they also valued the meat of bighorn sheep—and their horns, from which they made ceremonial objects and tools.

The fur trade brought thousands of colonial settlers to the Great Plains around 1800. The fur trading posts that emerged during this time often formed the basis of later settlements. During the course of the 19th century, as part of a massive population expansion to the West, more and more settlers emigrated to the Great Plains, creating scattered settlements everywhere. The first white American and European settlers permanently settled and built homes in the Great Plains beginning in 1865. At the same time, the indigenous population was pushed into reservations and the bison population numbers fell.

In fact, the number of bighorn sheep also fell sharply from the middle of the 19th century: before the middle of the 19th century there were said to have been two million bighorn sheep, around 1900 there were only 60,000 animals left.

Hunting, habitat loss and animal diseases

Due to the many new ranches and farms, the Badlands bighornen had little opportunity to escape from the 1880s onwards. They were hunted by the settlers’ dogs and also by the settlers with modern firearms. The settlement of areas always involves a loss of the natural habitat of the animals endemic there and often also with overgrazing by livestock. In this case, competition for food also plays a role, because both the wild sheep and the colonists’ domesticated farm animals feed on grasses and other plants.

Infection with diseases also led to a massive decline in the number of bighorn sheep. The World Conservation Organization IUCN writes that above all Animal epidemics that occurred regularly at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century have significantly reduced the number of wild sheep. When wild sheep come into contact with domestic sheep or goats, pathogens to which the wild animals are not resistant can be transmitted.

According to Day, the shooting of a large ram at Maggie Creek in the Killdeer Hills in 1905 is considered the last confirmed evidence of the Badlands bighorn’s existence. The last refuge of the Audubon sheep is said to have been Black Elk Peak (Harney Peak) in the 1920s, the highest mountain in South Dakota at 2,208 meters and east of the Rocky Mountains. Last but not least, the Badlands bighorne were also hunted because of their huge curved horns, which are ideal as trophies. In old male animals, the horns can weigh up to 14 kilograms and be more than 80 centimeters long.

Nobody knows exactly when the Badlands bighorn became extinct. Different sources give different dates. Len Kaufman and Kenneth Mallory go in The Last Extinction (1993) assume that the Badlands bighorn disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Other authors assume it was later. According to the published in 1973 List of Mammals which have become extinct or are possibly extinct since 1600 the species is said to have become extinct in 1910. And David Day writes that it could have been around 1925.

Badlands bighorn: subspecies or population?

Cowan’s classification of bighorn sheep subspecies was not definitive and has often been questioned. Zoologists Colin Groves and Peter Grubb take part in anatomical studies Ungulate Taxonomy (2011) even that there may not be any subspecies of bighorn sheep. Other zoologists later elevated subspecies to species status, such as the desert bighorn sheep, which is sometimes also referred to as Ovis nelsoni is conducted.

Based on morphometric properties alone, it is often difficult to tell whether they are one and the same or different species (see also Mexican grizzly or Bali tiger), but DNA analysis can simplify things. From 1993 onwards, a team of researchers led by biologist Rob Roy Ramey began to take a closer look at bighorn sheep on a morphological and genetic basis. Their study A morphometric reevaluation of the Peninsular bighorn sheep subspecies suggests that there are no seven subspecies.

Regarding the Badlands bighorn, they suspect that it is actually a Variation of the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep (O. c. canadensis) acts as a subspecies. Although there are morphological differences, such as longer teeth, these are not sufficient to establish species status. In the FWP publication Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep of Montana in 1950, Kenneth Thompson summarized the differences between Badlands bighorn sheep and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep as follows: The Audubon sheep had a “more massive jaw”, “lighter fur” and “darker eyes”.

Badlands bighorn or The sheep that won’t die

According to Ramey, recognition of the Audubon subspecies would mean that many other subspecies of bighorn sheep would have to be named due to minor morphological differences between them. Acceptance of the Badlands bighorne as a separate subspecies would also require that the Audubon sheep in the eastern Rocky Mountains and the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep in the western Rocky Mountains would have developed differently due to a very long period of spatial separation.

But Ramey considers this to be quite unlikely: There are no geographical boundaries between the supposed distribution areas of the Audubon and Rocky Mountain populations. During the Pleistocene glacial advance, most of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the plains to the east became open steppe habitat in which bighorn sheep could spread.

Later studies on the remains of the Badlands bighorn, according to Brett French in 2004, also took place The sheep that won’t die, show that it was probably not a separate subspecies; Audubon and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep are too similar.

In another 2016 in Journal of Mammalogy published DNA examination With more than 800 bighorn sheep, the Badlands bighorn is no longer even mentioned as a possible subspecies. The study suggests that it within the species bighorn sheep there are two very different clades exist: These correspond to the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep from the Rocky Mountains in the northwest of the USA and Canada and the Sierra bighorn sheep (C. o. Sierrae) from the Sierra Nevada in Mexico.

Whether subspecies or variation, there does not yet seem to be agreement. The Integrated Taxonomic Information System ITIS leads the Badlands bighorn O.c. auduboni at least still as a valid species. What is certain is that the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep now lives in the area in which the subspecies or population of Badlands bighorne was once said to have been found.

It is undisputed that the number of bighorn sheep, regardless of subspecies or population, declined significantly from the end of the 19th century as a result of hunting and poaching. Although hunting of bighorn sheep is strictly regulated today, population numbers have barely recovered. The IUCN lists the bighorn sheep species as endangered, but individual subspecies are considered threatened or critically endangered, such as the Mexican bighorn sheep (O. c. Mexicana), the Baja California bighorn sheep (O. c. cremnobates) and the Weems bighorn sheep (O. c. weemsi).

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