-We move now to how drought is endangering the state animal.

To be clear, drought is not a major threat to the desert bighorn sheep that gather here at Hemenway Park.

That's because they have more access to water, like the water content that's in the grass that they graze on.

But for bighorn sheep in multiple mountain ranges within just a couple of hours from here, the conditions are much different.

Take the Muddy Mountains at Valley of Fire State Park, for example.

That's where, because of drought, officials are planning to relocate the state animal out of state.

Mid-June is when the Nevada Department of Wildlife says it will start removing more than 100 desert bighorn sheep from the Muddy Mountains.

(Joe Bennett) Because if you remove sheep, then you got less mouths on landscape.

-It's a landscape that, prior to February 14, hadn't seen rain in eight months.

And when Nevada Week visited on February 28, it was to watch the state's Wildlife Department haul water to the sheep for an unprecedented third year out of the last four.

This water is taken out to what are called guzzlers.

They are man made water developments from which the sheep can drink, and the department says they're necessary, not only for hydration, but also to help these sheep digest the very dry vegetation that they have to eat from.

-So maybe the density of sheep that we had here from 2014-2019 when conditions were good, probably isn't sustainable anymore with these drying conditions.

And I'll tell you, the worst day of my career was when we were flying bighorn sheep surveys in 2020 and we flew over a guzzler in the West Muddies a few miles from here, and there were dead sheep at that water development because the guzzler was dry.

I hate saying that on camera, but I don't want to see that again.

(Patrick Cummings) It's a bad thing, in the sense that you don't have no other thing to resort to.

-Patrick Cummings is president of the Fraternity of the Desert Bighorn.

-Relocating animals, trapping them, removing them from, in this case, the Muddy Mountains here in Clark County is one way to lower the density.

It does a favor, not only for the animals that you're translocating, provided, of course, they can make the adjustment, they can manage the predator risk, because there are predators out there.

They are naive to a new environment that puts them at a disadvantage.

But removing animals also benefits the resident herd by lowering the density and the pressure on forage resources and water resources.

-Established in 1964 in Las Vegas, the nonprofit that Cummings leads helps pay for the water projects that keep the state animal alive.

Will sheep die from a lack of water in the Mojave Desert in the height of summer when vegetative conditions are so poor, when moisture is so low?

Yes.

They will die of terminal dehydration.

And then the question is, well, could they starve to death?

Could they enter into a state of irreversible malnourishment?

Yes, they can.

We're going to avoid that as best we can.

-Avoiding that is costly, as you can see from this presentation that the Nevada Department of Wildlife made in March.

-10 or $15,000 a day, this whole water haul effort might cost 500,000.

And then when you factor in moving sheep, where you got capture costs, you got GPS collar costs, you got sampling costs, you're looking at maybe another 400,000 if you move 150 sheep.

So when you throw in everything together, you might be talking about close to a million dollar project.

-Funding for the projects comes from donations, excise taxes on guns and ammunition, and hunting tags.

-The Heritage, we have two of those tags where they're sold at like banquets, like the Wild Sheep Foundation, and others, where they may raise $175,000 per tag.

And so I don't want to get too much in the weeds, because I don't want to seem like it's a story of the rich man hunting.

Yes, you and I probably can't afford that tag, but there are, like, other specialty tags, like our Silver State Tag, which it's a $20, essentially, raffle ticket, or our Dream Tag, where you can-- anybody could potentially win it.

-It's ironic winning a tag to hunt the same animal that several groups are trying to save, but it's also population control, which is what the Nevada Department of Wildlife will be doing when it begins moving up to 150 bighorn sheep from these mountains.

The Department says as many as 50 could go to Utah, and the rest will be released in parts of Nevada more suitable to their survival.

-Right now, these sheep have really small lambs, you know, so you don't really want to harass them with these little lambs.

And then also, when you're moving them to northern latitudes, this is the most important part, you don't want to throw a desert sheep into Northern Nevada right now or Central Nevada, because it'd be like throwing us into Canada right now.

You need to give them a chance to acclimate.

So we found-- but through drop netting, through captures, through everything, you move them in that June time frame, they acclimate well.

-If you're wondering why sheep from Valley of Fire can't be relocated here to Boulder City, the Nevada Department of Wildlife says that's because the sheep that are already here, the sheep that visit Hemenway Park, have pneumonia, and they would likely infect any new sheep.