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Category:Animals
Subcategory:Wildlife
Subcategory Detail:
Keywords:climbing, ram, sheep, riparian, desert, bonita creek, cliffs, cliff, desert bighorn sheep, hoofs, standing, horn, hooved, sonoran, rocks, Ovis, bighorn, male, Arizona, southwest, gila, walking, canadensis, deserts, horns, curl, nelsoni, gila river, national riparian preserve, sonoran desert, broomer
Ram On The Rocks

Ram On The Rocks

Captured a few days before Thanksgiving 2021, while I was working morning Autumn colors at the Gila Box. I just completed composing a cottonwood-lined river scene from the cliff above, when I heard the sound of a rock in the distance falling. Rocks don't just fall by themselves usually, and to hear the sound of that immediately told me to look for sheep butts across the canyon on the opposite cliff. I was rewarded within 5 seconds of scanning the terrain to spot this solitary broomer with full curl milling about. He was aware of me but didn't care...in fact, he even took a load off for a few minutes and laid down kind of sleepily, as if to wipe the sleep from his eyes. Soon enough though, he decided it was time to go down, so he got up and started making his way down the vertical rocky edge. I figured he was just going to the river below to get a drink, but was caught off guard when he got down to the bottom, because instead of casually walking over and getting a drink, he bolted like lightning across the canyon bottom to base of the cliff I was on...so quickly I could not even get a shot composed in time. Rams don't run, unless there is a damn good reason, and in this case the reason to run was because being out in the open in the bottom of the canyon is way too risky (having found cougar tracks down there the day before). Realizing he was just trying to cross to the opposite cliff in the box canyon, I grabbed my rig and started climbing to a point where I imagined I could catch him coming up on my side, but in the 20 seconds it took for me to reposition, he had already deftly scaled my side and was back to casually moving along. The whole episode lasted about 10 minutes.