Bighorn Sheep Rams
Three bighorn rams in sleet on the National Elk Refuge. Outside the breeding season, rams keep to their own company.
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Three bighorn rams move left to right in single file through sagebrush, the rearmost partly hidden behind the middle animal, with sleet streaking the air behind them. The photograph was made on the National Elk Refuge at the end of March 2020, in the months when the refuge's sheep can be watched from the Refuge Road.
Adult rams live apart from the ewes outside the breeding season, and rams join bands of other rams from two or three years old, so three of them travelling together is ordinary. Bighorn breeding runs through November and December and lambing from April to July; the last day of March sits in neither window.