Foothill residents get visitor: A backyard bighorn

Residents of a Foothills neighborhood were surprised with an unusual sight one day recently: a backyard bighorn.

“We were inside when our dogs started barking. I went to the back door and a bighorn sheep was standing right there” Saturday afternoon, May 21, said Allen Sheppard, who lives near North First Avenue and East Chula Vista Road.

“I grabbed my camera and took a couple of pictures,” Sheppard said. “It stood there for about a minute and then went into the wash. It was just cool to see the thing right there.”

A spokesman for the Arizona Game and Fish Department said the wayward bighorn ewe, which was wearing a GPS tracking collar, had made its way back to bighorn habitat in the Catalina Mountains by Saturday evening.

“People were calling us to tell us she was there” in a neighborhood about half a mile south of busy Ina Road, said department spokesman Mark Hart. “How she crossed Ina Road we don’t know. But we were keeping a very close eye on her via the GPS collar. She was back in the mountains as of 6 p.m. on Saturday.”

Some of the bighorn sheep in the Catalina Mountains — brought there in recent years in an effort to rebuild a herd that disappeared in the 1990s — are equipped with GPS collars. Others in the herd, with an estimated population of 81, were released without collars or have had their collars drop off.

EXPLORING TERRITORY

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Bighorns sometimes leave their normal habitat on “exploratory expeditions,” Hart said, and that could have brought the ewe into the Foothills neighborhood.

“This happens from time to time with bighorns exploring new territory,” he said. “Once they’ve satisfied their curiosity, they often head back to where they belong as in this case. Foothills neighborhoods are not good bighorn sheep habitat.”

ANOTHER BIGHORN DEATH

In related news, the Game and Fish Department reported another bighorn death in the Catalina Mountains.

On May 22, the GPS collar for a ewe sent a mortality alert, said a department report.

“The carcass was located later that day, and it was determined that predation was not the cause of death. Samples will be submitted to a laboratory for disease testing,” the report said.