Bighorn Sheep

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

We were driving through "my" canyon this morning on our way to a 9:00 appointment, you know that is crack 'o dawn for us, when we came upon this alongside the road. We had been on the lookout for Bighorn Sheep for a couple of weeks.

As soon as he could, Rich turned around and we went back. There was enough shoulder for us to park. Much to our delight there was a herd of Bighorn Sheep, not just this one, grazing and climbing the rock canyon wall across the road from us. This is what we could see from where we were parked.

This next photo has been cropped down to show you just the section of the photo above in which the Bighorn Sheep were seen and all of the following photos were shot.

Because of the distance, my camera was zoomed all the way which made it a challenge for me to see what I was shooting and to hold the camera still. These were culled from the 75 photos I shot of these sheep. Courtesy of that amazing 35x lens on my camera, you can see that these two Bighorns are eating the bushes just to the right of that large brown boulder that is near the road in the photo above.

This is another shot where you can get the perspective of the distance from which we were watching and shooting. You can easily find these gray and brown boulders in the cropped photo. From here all of them climbed upward; three had made it to the sloped line of green grass about three quarters of the way to the top of the cropped photo; the others were making their way up to there when we left.

There are six sheep in this shot.

There are seven sheep visible in this one.

I caught this one in mid-leap.

This shot shows eight sheep in various stages of their climb to that green ledge.

There are ten Bighorn Sheep visible in this next photo. Can you find all of them? They blend into the rocks so perfectly that they are nearly invisible.

If you found all ten you know that the two off to the left on the lower section were very young sheep. They had walked to the right from where they were standing in this photo and then, as the first one tried to leap up to the next landing, it fell...all the way down the canyon wall. It was one of the most terrifying and upsetting things I have ever witnessed. I couldn't imagine what we should do, what we could do. Within a short time though, during which I must have lost a couple years off my life, we saw it begin to climb back up...it was like a miracle! After breathing a huge sigh of relief, we turned around and continued on to the next adventure of the day...the one where we had the appointment.

Lovin' Life ~~ And Rare Wildlife Experiences