THE DESERT ^BIGHORN AND NEAR 

 RELATIVES 



(Ovis nelsoni 



In the most inaccessible canons, and on the 

 rugged, barren, and desolate heights of those 

 isolated mountains of mystic solitude which 

 thrust their serrated pinnacles and roughened 

 shoulders upward from the level of the desert 

 plains, dwells the largest and most majestic 

 of desert animals, the desert bighorn. It seems 

 strange that this near cousin of our Rocky 

 Mountain bighorn should find conditions con- 

 genial to his tastes in an almost waterless land 

 whose summers exhibit an unusual number of 



* Until quite recently all of the Far Western desert bighorns, 

 including those which occupy the mountains of northern Lower 

 California, were thought to belong to the species nelsoni, but 

 now it is shown that the sheep occupying the Lower California 

 highlands belong to the species cremnobates. The Nelson big- 

 horn, the true specimen of which was taken by Mr. E. W. Nel- 

 son, of the Biological Survey, on the Grapevine Mountains of 

 California, is the dominant species of western Nevada and 

 eastern California. The foijm found in the low desert ranges 

 south of the Gila and east of the Colorado River in Arizona 

 and northern Sonora are referred to the subspecies gaillardi of 

 the Rocky Mountain bighorn. 



