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Field-based research, education, and partnerships advancing wildlife conservation and resilient landscapes across the Borderlands.
A Brief History of Texas Bighorns
Historically, native desert bighorn sheep occupied 15-16 mountain ranges in the Trans-Pecos region. In the 1880s, an estimated 1,500 bighorns inhabited these mountain ranges and possibly as many as 2,500 prior to 1880.
However, by the mid-1940s they had disappeared from much of their native mountain ranges. By the early 1960s Texas’ native bighorns had been extirpated. Their demise was attributed to unregulated hunting, the introduction of domestic sheep and goats that competed with bighorns for resources, diseases from domestic sheep and goats that bighorns had not been exposed to, and net-wire fencing that impeded natural movements in search of food and water.
