The 15 sheep working on “A” Mountain have a simple job: eat as much invasive buffelgrass as they can.
Sonya Norman works with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and explained when they moved the sheep most recently, an unexpected monsoon storm rolled through.
“Right when we opened the gate to the enclosure,” Norman explains, “a bolt of lightning struck, rain started coming down and they couldn’t see where they were going and they crashed right through the little string corridor that was supposed to keep them.”
The sheep eventually made it to a newly designated area on the mountain. Norman and other researchers want to compare how well the method works in similar environments, and see whether targeted grazing could be a sustainable, long-term strategy to manage buffelgrass…