Most humans are disoriented to some degree by the weird dimensional
vastness of the Grand Canyon. It�s hard to come to grips with your own
comparatively insignificant presence and your high-maintenance needs
for survival in the face of a landscape so massive and inhospitable.
That's why the sight of a desert bighorn, standing on a ledge just
inches wide, calmly contemplating the sweep of the Canyon is so
stirring. The bighorn only stand 40 inches tall at the shoulder, but
appear completely at ease with their place in the Canyon. They zip from
ledge to ledge, seemingly oblivious of the potential for a disastrous
fall, focused on finding the sparse desert vegetation that somehow
sustains them.
Before the 1800s, desert bighorn numbered in the millions in the
Western US, ranging from Canada to Mexico, but hunting, mining, urban
development and agriculture diminished those numbers dramatically.
Diseases from domestic sheep have long been a threat to the bighorn, as
well as direct human interference in their populations from hunters and
ranchers wanting to preserve grazing for their herds. In the Grand
Canyon, the feral burros that escaped from mining and pioneer outposts
were deemed to pose serious competition for the scarce forage in the
Canyon, and were removed in the 1980s to give the sheep a better
chance.
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