LEE VINING, Calif. — Where the timber ends and granite stands against the clouds, four Sierra Nevada bighorn rams freeze for an instant -- noses facing the wind, horns curling from their heads, haunches taut. Then, silently, they vanish among the jagged crags and canyons between Yosemite and Mono Lake.
About 15 miles to the north, domestic sheep rancher Fred Fulstone gamely hauls his legs up a steep hillside of bitterbrush and sage. Then, spelling his lungs, the 85-year-old stockman watches somberly as government workers fasten tracking collars to five ewes. The devices are supposed to prevent his sheep from straying off undetected and infecting bighorns with pneumonia.
Since the 19th century, the bighorns and Sierra sheepmen have been symbols of the wild and free-ranging Western frontier. But today they are at odds, their fate intertwined in a costly, highly politicized battle over grazing rights on public lands.
Bighorn sheep -- In an article in Sunday's California section about bighorn sheep, Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity was incorrectly quoted as saying the "wildlife industry" wielded influence in the government's handling of grazing conflicts between the bighorns and domestic sheep. Galvin said the "livestock industry" influenced the government's handling of the issue.
"It is being closely watched by the sheep industry and other livestock producers that rely on public land grazing," said Lesa Eidman, executive director of the California Wool Growers Assn. "Those producers who lose access to public lands will have to cut back the number of sheep they graze, and that will have severe economic impacts on them, local communities and the industry."
Pressed by the livestock industry, environmentalists and politicians, federal officials in the Sierra have struggled to accommodate both wild and domestic sheep, which consume the same high-country brush and grasses during the summer.
Once abundant, the bighorns declined so precipitously that six years ago they were added to the federal endangered species list. But as the population began to recover and bighorns wandered onto land used by domestic sheep, wildlife officials feared that bighorns would be exposed to a disease that could wipe out entire herds and undo a $5-million recovery effort.
Forest managers have closed some areas to commercial grazing and placed new restrictions on most of the remaining eastern Sierra sheepherders, whose industry already was suffering from foreign competition and loss of federal price supports for wool.
