The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs were recently recognized by the Wild Sheep Foundation for their ongoing efforts to preserve bighorn sheep populations. They’ve been taking measures to protect wild sheep in Oregon since the 1980s, helping to manage disease and predation.
Austin Smith, general manager of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs branch of natural resources, joins us to discuss what’s threatening the population and what it takes to protect these animals in Oregon.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs have been taking measures to protect wild bighorn sheep in Oregon since the 1980s. The tribe helps to manage disease and predation. Their ongoing efforts were recently recognized by the Wild Sheep Foundation. Austin Smith Jr. is the general manager of the tribe’s branch of natural resources, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Austin Smith: Hey Dave, thanks for having me.
Miller: My understanding is that the tribe’s efforts to restore populations of bighorn sheep, they’ve been going on for decades, now. How low did the population of these sheep get?
Smith: Well, in our state of Oregon they were pretty low. I mean, from just thousands to hundreds were basically extirpated from the areas in the early years of colonization of this region.
Miller: What did the tribe’s original work entail, decades ago?
Smith: Well, for one, we really were exercising our treaty-reserved right, and that was to have not only big game to hunt and harvest, but to have those populations sustainable. We worked with non-governmental agencies and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to lobby for big horn sheep management in the state of Oregon.
Miller: Management meaning what?
Smith: Looking at populations that were needing to come back from the brink of extinction in these metapopulations in Oregon. We would lobby, we would go to the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, they have access to different pots of money, as well as fundraising to get big horn sheep populations back into areas where they once were.
That meant projects outside the state, so getting populations from, say Canada’s population, where they were doing really well back in the 80s and 90s, and repopulating areas here in Oregon where there used to be sheep, where the habitat exists, and where the habitat was coming back from over-harvest grazing of the area as well as removing areas that were undesirable species like domestic sheep from areas. So that all attributed to populations coming back and the tribes were very pivotal in that as well as the state and NGOs.
Miller: What is the population like now in tribal lands or lands that you have some hand in managing?
Smith: For the majority in Oregon, the population has came back pretty significantly for our population alone, for the reservation. We started off with 20 sheep that were translocated into our area to habitat, and those have grown to well over 300 within the last 23 years. And that’s the same thing with some of the other populations that fall on our ceded lands like the John Day Basin, the Deschutes River Basin, the populations have come back in the thousands.
Miller: What are the challenges right now to big horn sheep populations, the pressures on them?
Smith: Everything from climate variability to predation, and the biggest one really is the disease. There’s different types of diseases out there that really impact, mycoplasma ovipneumoniae is one of them. This is a bacteria that’s often fatal, and pneumonia in bighorn sheep and goats as well, and most of that contact is by contact with domestic sheep or goats.
Miller: Domestic meaning sheep or goats that are being grown for farms, just ranchers.
Smith: Exactly, like producers. So ranches and farms maybe having sheep, well, it will be known that they carry and can transmit this into the wild populations, which is very much fatal for a population.
Miller: Well, it seems hard to keep wild bighorn sheep away from a domestic flock of sheep in a large area. How do you do that?
Smith: Well, a lot of it is just with advocating for bighorn sheep. There’s a lot of hunters and fishermen and outdoorsmen and different foundations like Wild Sheep Foundation that advocate for keeping these domestics, helping them out with, say, fencing requirements, with seasonal grazing on permit fees out in the national forests where they’re allowed, so limiting that.
It can be troublesome sometimes. You’re really impeding on a right to have livestock and produce, but at the same time, there’s wild sheep that are utilizing these same areas, same habitats, and so there’s a push-and-shove with some of it. One, you’re getting not only the habitat management and the resource management that not only covers bighorn sheep but other ungulates on the landscape; and on the other side, you want to incentivize producers that contribute to the economy and to the resources as well, so, it’s a lot of work in progress.
Miller: Can you tell us how you’ve been able to raise upwards of $700,000 in the last three years for bighorn sheep preservation?
Smith: That story really began in the early 2000s when we actually received a population of bighorn to be reintroduced on the reservation, which we are a sovereign nation. We create our own rules and regulations and manage our resources for hunting and fishing and everything else. On top of that, growing these sheep to the population they’re at now, we were approached by Wild Sheep Foundation, via some hunting guides – one of my buddies got a tag, he reached out to hunting guides. Well, lo and behold, they connected us with a lot of the Wild Sheep Foundation National, Oregon chapter of Wild Sheep, and they wanted to check in, see how our population was doing, and then they asked, “How are you going for funding to manage your resources?” Mind you, we don’t get a lot of funding like other agencies do, like the state of Oregon. Most of our funding is federal, and the federal funding is very minimal, so we have to decide, how do we fundraise? So Wild Sheep Foundation offered to auction off a permit.
One single permit is done each year in the beginning of the year at the Wild Sheep Foundation’s sheep show down in Reno, Nevada. We had to go through our tribal council, our fish and wild committees to get approval to do this, because nobody is allowed to hunt any big game on the reservation other than tribal members. So this was a specialty tag. We had to approach this pretty cautiously, being that we’re opening up now to the public to hunt on the reservation, which is our exclusive right and sovereignty to hunt and exercise our treaty.
So we successfully did get an approval to auction this tag off, we went down to the wild sheep show, which is a weeklong event where you’re able to basically showcase your tag, your permit, or your permits, depending on if you’re allowed more than one. So we had one permit where, it’s kind of like any type of hunter expo or sportsman show, you’re down on the floor, multiple booths throughout the area at this big convention. And you have people randomly showing up and asking us about our sheep, and mind you, we have a California bighorn sheep population and one of our tribal members did take a state record. It was one of the top three when he got it, and today it’s probably one of the top ten in the state.
Miller: In terms of the size or impressiveness of the rack of the horns.
Smith: The size, yeah, it’s a Boone and Crockett size class, so it’s a 184+, which is a pretty significant size for California Bighorn. We got to showcase that off and then they auctioned it off on the grand finale. So that Saturday night, they auctioned it off and that thing went for $230,000 for this one permit.
Miller: Meaning some hopefully very rich person or else somebody who does not know how to manage their money, they spent $230,000 for the right to come on to tribal land to shoot one bighorn sheep?
Smith: Yes.
Miller: And most of that money goes to the tribe, to your department, so you can actually do restoration work for the rest of the population?
Smith: Exactly, yeah, 100% of it goes back to the tribe, to conservation efforts, to bighorn sheep habitat management. And it funds the operation and management of my wildlife program. The idea is putting more sheep on the mountain. We successfully raised $760,000 within the last few years now and it’s been pretty significant for us, being that there’s funds that are going away. There’s funds that are being reduced, especially with the economy and the current administration, we had to be ready for this. We don’t get any other funds other than what we can, foundation and revenue, we’re gonna have to put it back into the resources and so that’s what we’re doing.
Miller: Austin Smith, thanks very much.
Smith: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Austin Smith Jr. is the general manager of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs branch of natural resources.
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