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SALT LAKE CITY — Fifty bighorn sheep have a new home in Utah. The animals were captured earlier this week in Nevada and transported via helicopter to southern Utah.
The move is part of a capture-and-release program to transport the sheep from places of dense population — in this case Nevada's Muddy Mountains — to areas that have a sparse bighorn sheep population.
"Utah has probably the most unoccupied habitat — good, unoccupied habitat — in the West, and so it's going to benefit all of us," said Mike Cox, a biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife.
"The more herds we have," Cox said, "the less likely we'll see population declines that we can't overcome. And the more we scatter them across the landscape, the more they're going to do well."
The sheep transported this past week were taken to Bullfrog, Utah, and then airlifted to a remote canyon in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Cox and other biologists involved in the move it went very well.
This was the second such capture-and-release operation between Nevada and Utah in a little more than a year. In October 2012, the two agencies moved 50 Nevada sheep from the River and Muddy mountain herds and released them in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.
Contributing: Associated Press
