Radium Headbangers

This big fellow was taking it easy early one morning over by the Radium baseball field. They were also in people's yards, in front of the hotel, and on the golf course.

Every year the Bighorn Sheep come down out of the mountains to spend a little quality time in the town of Radium. November is the rut, and in spring the ewes go high in mountains to have their lambs after a 6 month gestation. The rams and ewes hang out in two different herds and only get together in the fall.

It is very easy to get a photograph, there are a lot of them. But it is can be hard to get one without houses in the background (unless you have a big telephoto lens like the one used here and open it wide up to throw everything in the background out of focus).

By the way, the horns on these guys can weigh 30 pounds and the sheep can weigh over 300 pounds. They sometimes charge each other, leap up, and bang heads. That would hurt almost as much as being kicked by a Missouri mule. The head butting we saw was over pretty quick. They weren't charging but would butt from a short distance with a loud cracking noise resulting. There was some procreation going on also but this is a family blog so I won't go into that.