Texas Can’t Quit the Aoudad
Allen Smith decided long ago what to do about the aoudads that wander onto his family’s land.
“The first four I saw, I shot,” he tells me.
From 5,000 feet up, in Smith’s Cessna Skymaster, the choices other Texans have made for their land roll out below—the network of oil and gas wells, the reflective surfaces of solar farms, the sleepaway camps, rodeo arenas, and dried-up, gutter-like creek beds. Smith’s family acreage, once dedicated to cattle, is now a refuge for native wildlife. From this perch in the sky, only movement would distinguish the tawny body of an aoudad from its desert habitat. Fringed in long hair from throat to chest, aoudads travel in a massive herd called an anger and scale steep cliffsides with surprising agility and speed. Their curved horns can easily exceed two feet in length.
Once, a different species—the native desert bighorn sheep—roamed the Southwest in abundance. But by the end of the 19th century, overhunting, habitat loss, and disease pared North American populations down to thousands of individuals. When the bighorns began disappearing from West Texas in the early 20th century, the North African aoudad took their place. Imported by zoos, and later set loose by private owners and public officials, aoudads flourished where bighorns had struggled to survive.
These two desert
