Bighorn ram 'looking for love' in city limits captured by ODFW

The 4-year-old ram, from the Burnt River Canyon herd southeast of town, received a lot of attention on social media, with several people getting photographs or videos.

Employees from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) searched for the ram as dusk fell Tuesday, but they had no luck finding the animal.

But on Wednesday morning, Nov. 16, biologists tracked down the ram and shot it with a tranquilizer dart to immobilize the powerful animal, which was in a yard at 15th and Broadway streets, about five blocks west of the railroad tracks.

Brian Ratliff, district wildlife biologist at ODFW’s Baker City office, said he took an airplane flight over town Wednesday morning to try to get a signal from the radio tracking collar the ram was wearing. Ratliff said he quickly picked up the signal, and about the same time an Oregon State Police officer called to say the ram was at 15th and Broadway.

Ratliff, who has worked in Baker City for about 16 years, said the ram is the first to wander into a city neighborhood that he knows of.

“We’ve had multiple bighorn sheep there on the hill just behind the golf course,” Ratliff said.

He said the ram was most likely “looking for love,” when it wandered into town, possibly lured by a domesticated animal. He said this is the peak of the bighorn breeding season.

The ram was quarantined at the ODFW station on Hughes Lane in Baker City while biologists waited for results of disease tests.

Ratliff said the results, which were all negative, arrived late Thursday afternoon, Nov. 17, and on Friday morning he was hooking up the trailer to haul the ram back to the Burnt River Canyon for release.

Ratliff said he was especially concerned about the ram being infected with Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae bacteria, which has infected sheep in both of Baker County’s bighorn herds over the past three years and caused fatal pneumonia in dozens of the animals.

Ratliff said the ram, which ODFW first trapped and collared on Dec. 2, 2021, has been exposed to the bacteria based on test results. But the nasal swab that biologists took on Wednesday was negative, and the sheep showed no signs of illness.

Ratliff believes the bacteria first infected sheep in the Lookout Mountain unit in eastern Baker County, north of Interstate 84 and south of Highway 86.

Sick and dead sheep were found in that area starting in February 2020. The Lookout Mountain sheep are Rocky Mountain bighorns.

Around October 2020, sheep in the Burnt River Canyon herd — those are California bighorns, a somewhat smaller subspecies — also began dying. Ratliff believes sheep from the Burnt River Canyon herd, which is just south of Interstate 84, crossed the freeway and mingled with infected Lookout Mountain bighorns.

ODFW has not determined the source of the bacteria that initially infected Lookout Mountain sheep.

Ratliff estimated that all of the lambs born in the Lookout Mountain unit in the spring of 2020 — 65 to 70 animals — died due to the bacteria, along with about 75 adult bighorns. The herd, which has been Oregon’s biggest herd of Rocky Mountain bighorns, included about 400 sheep as recently as 2018.

Few, if any, lambs survived in 2021, but Ratliff said one group of sheep seems to have fared better in 2022.

The Burnt River Canyon herd is much smaller, with about 75 to 85 sheep, and biologists counted 14 lambs in the area this spring. That compares with a pre-infection average of 25 to 30 lambs per year.

Ratliff said he replaced the ram’s radio collar with a GPS version that makes it easier for biologists to track its movements remotely. The radio collar signals have a limited range.