This year’s G.C.F. Dalziel Outstanding Guide Award recipient, Jorge Artee of Sierra El Álamo in Mexico’s state of Sonora, was praised at the Sheep Show’s Grand Finale Banquet as a huge-hearted man who approaches all clients with love to create a transformational experience out of desert sheep hunting. His 30-plus years of guiding successful, safe hunts were far from the whole story. In accepting the award, Jorge explained that guiding sheep hunts had been his boyhood “burning passion,” which his parents and three brothers pushed him to chase.

“Everything begins with a dream,” Jorge declared in accepting the Dalziel Award. It was all about “unconditional love,” Artee added. That love is so big he readily shares it: Peers respect him, clients trust him, his family cherishes him. Beyond this, Sonoran desert sheep draw strength from him and the Artee family that have nurtured and liberated them.

Years ago, Jorge’s father and Sierra El Álamo founder Javier Artee and his sons began freeing desert bighorns from high-fence enclosures to roam their historic range. These releases continue to this day and amount to hundreds of rewilded desert sheep. The romance of stately desert rams posed on Sonora’s prismatic mountains is the result of the Artees’ labor of love involving tremendous financial commitment and risk. In the end, if these desert bighorns and the family whose future is tied to them shall succeed, sound science must inform each decision. Yet, a tremendous knowledge gap exists.

Scientific studies on the spatial ecology of desert bighorn sheep in Mexico are rare. The effects of habitat management, including the establishment of permanent water sources, have not been widely evaluated in reintroduced desert bighorns. All this is about to change.

 

Thanks to grant funding from WSF, a binational team of researchers based at Texas A&M University and at Universidad Autónoma Agraria Antonio Narro in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, is providing groundbreaking technology and expertise to study Sierra El Álamo’s sheep in the wild. With data collected from sheep wearing GPS collars equipped with video capability, Sierra El Álamo is pioneering science-based desert sheep conservation and management that can be applied on a much larger scale throughout northern Mexico. The results released so far in this multi-year endeavor are already generating excitement and offer an example of how this novel technology can benefit other wild sheep populations.

Satellite telemetry collars for wildlife studies are nothing new, but the addition of video cameras is extremely uncommon in wildlife studies. Each collar costs thousands, then comes the expense of researchers gathering and evaluating the resulting data. With partial support from a $40,000 WSF grant, GPS collars equipped with video are being deployed on desert sheep released over a three-year period to ramble at will and join wild herds at Sierra El Álamo.

In 2022, the first 16 desert bighorns in the study, nine wearing video-equipped collars and the rest with GPS only, were set free. As this story goes to print, another 12 GPS-collared sheep, with one carrying video technology, are being prepared for release along with several other herd mates. An additional six to twelve collared sheep will be set free at the ranch later this year, according to Jacob Artee of Sierra El Álamo, with a total of 24 to 32 more animals rewilded. In all, the study will amass data from 28 GPS-collared desert bighorns, with 10 of them video-enabled.

Three times daily, in the morning, afternoon, and right before sunset, each collar’s camera clicks on, taking 15-second clips. While GPS data is transmitted in real time to reveal a sheep’s exact location, the videos are not available to the research team until the collar is recovered after a year riding around on a bighorn’s neck. Each collar is equipped with a small device engineered to quietly pop the strap so it drops off at a specific programmed date and time after one year of wearing. The automatic drop-off removes any need to recapture the sheep to recover the hardware. Satellite data allows researchers and the Artees to locate collars anywhere they land.

Dovetailed with data points showing precise topography and locations of each collared animal, the videos provide researchers a more holistic view of desert bighorn life in the Sonora Desert. Once compiled and analyzed, the three years of data encompassing tens of thousands of locations and hours of video will reveal the sheep’s secret everyday affairs, everything from their food and water choices, segregation of the sexes, survivorship, daily movement patterns, lambing habitat, breeding activity, stressors, causes of death, distant migrations, and much more.

If you ever dreamed of living as an embedded spy within a desert bighorn community, this is the closest you will ever get. Clips posted of the operation so far show sheep foraging through a variety of food options, nibbling on cactus, tree bark and foliage, bedding down in caves, milling with their brethren, and gazing from high rock perches across the desert landscape. Instead of offering scientists a blip on a map, the video reveals details never seen before in the desert sheep world.

 

Texas A&M wildlife scientist Dr. Stephen Webb is the university’s professional lead on the collaring project. “We are leveraging this study to inform the Artees’ operations and their on-the-ground sheep and habitat management decisions. For example, we can help them determine if their water projects are optimized, based on where we find the sheep and where they go on the ranch,” Webb says.

This information is invaluable to the Artees, who have entwined their future with the fate of their desert bighorns. “We are releasing the sheep, but what is happening to them? How many migrate back and forth from one mountain to another? How many stay, and how many leave our ranch?” asks Jorge Artee. “It’s very important what’s happening now at Sierra El Álamo because it’s also documented on video. It’s going to be exciting to see the results.”

That excitement is building, with the Artees having recently shipped the first translocation’s video collars to Texas A&M. Research findings, according to Webb, can help the Artees assess the best places to install new water resources or make habitat improvements at Sierra El Álamo. The study can also inform the Artees on the mechanics of future desert bighorn releases—how many to set free at once, at what ideal time and whether it is best to open a gate and let the sheep wander out on their own, or to capture, transport and release them elsewhere on the ranch—the where, when and how of sheep rewilding.

“Whenever you move sheep from one environment to another, we want to give them the best chance of success by providing appropriate habitat and other sheep to join in the wild,” Webb notes.

A chance encounter orchestrated by WSF led to this unique research collaboration. Back in 2019, Jorge and his brother Jacob Artee were attending the WSF-hosted 7th World Mountain Ungulate Conference in Bozeman, Montana, and encountered Dr. Alejandro Lozano, a wildlife biologist, researcher and professor at Universidad Autónoma Agraria Antonio Narro in the state of Coahuila. Hailing originally from Coahuila and holding a Ph.D. from Texas A&M–Kingsville, Lozano was already serving as a consultant on desert bighorn and other ungulate repopulation projects in his home state. Lozano wanted to study desert bighorns and other wildlife in Sonora. Jorge and Jacob had the ideal place and an immediate interest in Lozano’s research. It was a serendipitous meeting.

After the conference, Lozano started talking to his Texas A&M colleagues, and WSF ultimately approved a grant to support the collaring project that would be designed and managed by Texas A&M under Webb and Lozano’s supervision. Lozano’s son Ivan, also a graduate student at Texas A&M, added his drone expertise and is participating in the project by assisting in analyzing drone footage of the released sheep and the ranch, which added yet another layer to the study.

“This is how everything starts,” Jacob Artee notes. “We met in Montana, and from there everything connected.” With WSF funding, Ph.D. candidate Dylan Stewart of Texas A&M’s Rangeland, Wildlife & Fisheries Management Program is in charge of gathering and assessing the collar data, which will be parlayed into his doctoral dissertation and other publications to showcase the novel research. Now, with the video collars from the Artees’ first desert bighorn translocation in hand, Webb and Stewart are processing the digital film and preparing to publish their initial findings.

“We expect to get some very unique insight into the ecology of desert bighorn sheep,” Stewart says. While the stream of new video is just arriving, the GPS data has been pouring in all along, providing researchers a daily trove of valuable insights.

“I can analyze the data in real time,” explains Stewart. “These GPS collars that transmit location data in real time allow us to react and make quick management decisions, if need be. For example, we know immediately if a bighorn sheep is moving close to a domestic sheep herd.”

The collars at Sierra El Álamo also alert researchers when a bighorn does not move for eight hours, indicating it has died. Mortality sensors in the collars send out texts and emails notifying researchers of a potential sheep death, Webb says. From there, the Texas A&M team alerts the Artees so they can investigate and head straight to the precise location where the sensor went off.

In one instance, the death signal arrived, and the Artees’ inspection indicated a likely cougar predation on the ewe. After receiving the deceased ewe’s collar, Webb and Stewart were amazed at what they witnessed. Video footage showed the sheep’s final resting location in late evening, and by the following morning, the next clip revealed the lens covered in sticks. The ewe had been buried, most likely by the lion that had killed her.

“Cameras on the collars tell us so much more,” Jacob Artee says. “Is the sheep alone? Why is he there? What’s going on? The video tells the story.”

“This is a whole new realm,” Stewart declares. Dovetailing the video clips with satellite pinpointed locations, “We get unique insight into what a sheep is doing, where they eat, sleep and who they hang out with. We get glimpses into what they do when they move long distances from their typical range, then return.”

 

To date, the Artees have turned 340 desert bighorns out of high-fenced habitat and into the wild. In the first releases, some sheep stuck around Sierra El Álamo, while others meandered to parts unknown.

“That’s part of the program, so they can expand their range,” Jacob says. The latest bighorns the Artees set free, however, all stayed close to home. “This tells us that the water projects, feeders and everything we’re doing is right.”

One thing the binational researchers have gathered from the video collars and visual observations is that formerly fenced bighorns, once let loose, waste no time in joining their freeroaming brethren. Newly released sheep adapt to freedom by finding teachers from their own species in the wild, according to Webb. This visibly lessens the stress on the animal, as evidenced by the collar data and video footage revealing normal feeding patterns and mingling activity after joining an established group on the range.

“We can validate our bighorn sheep behavioral models using video technology,” Stewart explains. Video can also lead researchers to revise their models when reality captured on camera doesn’t stack up with theory. “We can either guess what a released desert bighorn’s behavior will be, or we can use video to actually see what happens in the field.”

Beyond building a mountain of new insights into desert bighorn sheep habits and health, the goal is to establish similar video collaring programs elsewhere, using Sierra El Álamo as a research model.

“The idea is to replicate the model elsewhere,” Jacob Artee says. “We would love to have these collars in other places around Sonora.” Lozano has big dreams for the project as well. “My vision is to repopulate desert bighorns in all of northern Mexico where the habitat is most suitable. This will increase the economic opportunities for private landowners and also for communal landowners in Mexico who need a better quality of life, for these are very poor people.”

Ultimately, Lozano sees large desert bighorn herds roving unimpeded by fences between the US and Mexico, which he calls a “conservation model of no boundaries.” With vast ecoregions hospitable to desert bighorns spanning Texas, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and other states in Mexico, this no-boundaries approach is best for wildlife to thrive.

“The only way to improve conservation is to develop practical research to increase our knowledge,” Lozano says. “WSF has made a great impact in northern Mexico with desert bighorns, and I would love to see more. We have a great opportunity to expand WSF’s vision for desert bighorns throughout northern Mexico.”

Stewart’s doctoral dissertation will publish the study’s findings upon his graduation in 2027. Beyond this, the Texas A&M team anticipates taking their results to the general public through publication in scientific journals, on social media, and in presentations to landowner groups, scientific associations, and school classes. At this year’s Sheep Show® Youth Wildlife Conservation Experience, Stewart served as a volunteer and wowed kids of all ages with videos from the collared sheep at Sierra El Álamo. Meanwhile, the Artees applaud the separate WSF grant that supported expansion of the ranch’s water system. Over the past three years, the Artees have installed an extensive new network of pipes to reach 22 spots where wildlife can drink. The latest upgrade to the system is a main well and a pump, all solar-powered, that send water up to a huge holding tank built on a saddle between peaks at an elevation of 2,500 feet. From there, water flows by gravity through 10 miles of newly established pipelines to fill guzzlers across about 40 percent of the ranch. This replaces the old system requiring trucking water for miles.

Over the past six years, WSF has provided $115,000 to support Sierra El Álamo’s water infrastructure projects. Between the new water works and nutritional supplements—alfalfa and protein pellets—that the Artees supply daily, the area’s desert sheep, mule and Coues deer, javelina, foxes and birds are reaping the benefits. Rams with heavier curls dot the horizon. Quail, once scarce at the ranch, now flock by the hundreds. Species gather for water despite years of withering drought.

“We’re doing this for all the animals, and it’s working,” says Jorge Artee. Yet, Jorge would be quick to admit that all this is no simple tale of pipes, tanks, collars, or cameras, or even guiding and hunting. It’s a love story, set in a magical desert and starring the beautiful bighorns God sent to inspire His people.

 

Check out the desert bighorn video compilation:

 

 

This story was originally published with Wild Sheep Magazine, written by Ashley McEnroe with photos by Ivan Lozano, Texas A&M.