Barbary Sheep Removal To Temporarily Close Parts Of Big Bend National Park

Desert bighorn sheep / NPS

On October 9-10, the National Park Service will resume a program to reduce the population of aoudad in Texas' Big Bend National Park. Sections of the park will be closed while the park service conducts the operations.

Portions of the Mesa de Anguila ( the Rio Grande and Santa Elena Canyon Trail will remain open) and Deadhorse Mountains and surrounding areas, including the Dagger Flat Road and Old Ore Road, will be closed for aerial surveys and hunting the aoudad. See attached map below.

Aoudad, or Barbary sheep, are a species of sheep native to North Africa. In the early 1900s, they were introduced to the United States in private collections, and in the 1950s, several dozen were released to the wild in New Mexico and Texas.

They're exotic-looking animals, with curling, swept-back horns that can reach two feet in length, and a swinging fringe of a beard running the length of their long, brawny necks. They're superbly adapted to the arid, rocky sections of Big Bend National Park and have reproduced rapidly, outcompeting the native desert big horn sheep and pushing the native sheep to poorer feeding areas.

The aoudad, or Barbary sheep / Pixabay

The National Park Service began a program to cull the Aoudad herds (a herd of Barbary sheep is called an anger) in 2019, in order to protect the native bighorn. Specially trained sharpshooters hunt the animals from helicopters, with surveys conducted periodically to reassess the size of the herd.

Map of closure areas for Deadhorse Mountains area aoudad survey / NPS

Map of closure area for the Mesa de Anguila area aoudad survey / NPS

Barbary sheep have been a problem in Big Bend for decades. I documented this invasive species in the Chisos Basin back in 1980, but no one took the situation seriously. The National Park Service waited too long to address the uncontrollable problem in Big Bend and Texas Parks and Wildlife is to blame for allowing exotics to take over the state years in the first place. The ecosystem is really messed up because of the ongoing lack of interest and concern for the conservation of native wildlife. Barbary sheep will be killed to make room for native desert bighorn and native mountain lions will be killed to protect desert bighorn projects in protected areas like Big Bend and Franklin Mountains State Park to enhance the gene pool for trophy hunting. There is little or no interest in protecting the natural balance including predators like the wolf because of ignorance, politics and park managers with little backbone to stand up for what is right. It's a dirty rotten shame that mountain lions are killed to protect sheep for trophy hunters in Texas using green washing as part of their public relations campaign. The NPS is missing conservation heroes like Franklin D. Roosevelt and former Director William Penn Mott who promoted wolf conservation years ago resulting in wolves coming back to Yellowstone. At Big Bend National Park, they are spending over $20 million dollars to restore the restaurant and gift shop in the Chisos Basin rather than put together a budget to restore native wildlife.

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