Shoppers at an Orem Kohl’s may have seen an unusual customer on Monday morning: a bighorn sheep ram.
The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources relocated a 4-year-old ram from an Orem resident’s yard earlier this week, not long after the animal was seen wandering the parking lot of the nearby shopping center.
DWR central region outreach manager Scott Root said bighorn sheep usually hang out close to the area’s rocky foothills, but occasionally rams will stray lower, looking for ewes during the November breeding season.
The wildlife division team tranquilized the animal, loaded it into a horse trailer and took him back to his natural mountain habitat. But the ram’s trip to Kohl’s wasn’t in vain. Root said he returned home with a new accessory: a GPS collar, which will alert the wildlife division if the animal comes back into town.
“We want to understand their migration patterns; we want to know where they hang out,” Root said. “In this case, because there’s such a risk of transmission of pneumonia and other diseases from domestic livestock, if those bighorn sheep come to town, we want to be over there immediately and try to get it back up on the mountain.”
As Utah gets snowier this winter, people may experience more wildlife encounters — which have been especially common recently due to the drought. Root said deer and elk will likely descend into the foothills looking for water, lush vegetation and a reprieve from the mountains’ deep snow.
These deer may be followed by mountain lions, since they are the predator’s main food source. Root recommends Utahns to visit the Wild Aware website to learn more about what to do if they come across different species in the coming months.
As for the ram, Root said everything went smoothly with his relocation. He was given a reversal drug to wake him from sedation when they arrived in the mountains, and they hope he’ll stay up there with the rest of the area’s bighorns.
“We opened the door and the darn thing didn’t even want to leave the horse trailer,” Root said. “But we had a pole with us; we just kind of tapped it on the backside, and it just started out the trailer and went up the hill. So everything worked out great.”
