Ramming into a Wildlife Encounter

On an early morning walk to the canyon edge I heard a large animal moving around, and pretty close to us, too.  And it was getting closer.

Soon I could see him.  A bighorn sheep ram -- let's call him El Borrego -- was actually walking towards us.  Hopefully my little dog would not see him and start barking.  I tried to freeze and get my camera ready at the same time.

El Borrego saw me.  He kept making direct eye contact with me, the same way that coyotes sometimes will.  At first I wondered if El Borrego was crazy, rabid, or something.  Closer inspection of his collar might provide the explanation:

 Gosh, is it possible that the Utah state wildlife people are over-managing the wildlife a little?

But at the time I was so excited that I didn't see the GPS collar, and instead thought only of freezing, to see how close El Borrego would come.  He came up to the rim of the canyon, maybe 75 feet away from me, and coyly looked at me while hiding behind a bush:

Later in the bike ride I saw a second, but smaller, ram.  They make quite a bit of noise when they run.  Later still I saw "the ladies:" 

There were about 25 of them.

A good traveler might put these surprising encounters together and make a story of them:  the Ram ran into a couple wildlife managers somewhere else in Utah.  They zapped him with a tranquilizer gun and put him on a truck.  When he woke up he was in my area, where a harem of 25 receptive females was waiting for his services.

The male mind being what it is, ever since, when he sees a human, he expects good things to come of it.  Or something like that.

Actually this is my first encounter with a bighorn sheep for quite a few years.  My second RV dog, Coffee Girl, corralled five bighorns on a saddle in one of Arizona's sky islands.  She would charge them.  They would condense into a "shield wall" like ancient or medieval warriors.  Then she would come at them from a different angle.  They would turn in unison to face her.

At first I was quite concerned.  But from their point of view, she was just a coyote making a nuisance of itself.  And they knew how to handle that.

Oh I forgot.  I once came close to a young bighorn, but it is hard to distinguish young deer, elk, or borregos.