Mouflon

The mouflon (Ovis gmelini) is a wild sheep, not a goat, that lives in the mountains and hills of Western Asia, from eastern Türkiye and the Caucasus to Iran, and on the island of Cyprus. Its name comes into English from French, which took it from the Italian muflone, the word used in Corsica and Sardinia. The mouflon is famous for one reason above all: it is the wild ancestor of the domestic sheep. Around 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, early farmers in southeastern Anatolia and the nearby lands of the Fertile Crescent began to keep and breed mouflons, and from those animals came every breed of sheep in the world today. Domestic sheep and mouflons can still interbreed and produce fertile young. Older books often call the mouflon Ovis orientalis, and some still group it with the urial of Central Asia, but the IUCN now treats the mouflon as its own species, Ovis gmelini, with several regional forms such as the Armenian, Anatolian, Esfahan, Laristan and Cyprus mouflons. Mouflons are among the smallest wild sheep, much smaller than the argali of Central Asia or the bighorn of North America, and they are agile climbers that rely on speed and rough ground to escape their enemies.

The European mouflon is the mouflon of the islands of Corsica and Sardinia, often called Ovis gmelini musimon or Ovis aries musimon. It looks very much like the Asian mouflon, with a reddish brown coat, a pale saddle patch on the males and curled horns, but its story is different. There are no truly wild mouflons native to Europe today. Archaeology and genetics show that the animals of Corsica and Sardinia descend from some of the earliest domestic sheep, brought to the islands by Neolithic farmers about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. Some of those sheep escaped or were released, returned to a wild life and kept the look of their wild ancestors, which makes the European mouflon a very old feral population rather than a truly wild one. Because of that, the IUCN does not count it as part of the native range of the species, and scientists still debate whether to treat it as a wild sheep or as a primitive domestic one. Mainly since the nineteenth century, mouflons from Corsica and Sardinia have been released for hunting in many parts of mainland Europe, and they are now common in game reserves and mountain forests there. In some places they damage young trees and compete with native animals, so they are managed as an introduced species.

The Cyprus mouflon, Ovis gmelini ophion, known on the island as agrino, is the national animal of Cyprus and the largest wild mammal on the island. It is one of the smallest forms of mouflon, with a reddish coat, a pale saddle in the males and horns that curve in a tighter circle. Like the European mouflon, it seems to descend from sheep that people brought to the island in the early Neolithic, more than 10,000 years ago, but genetic studies show it is close to the wild mouflons of Anatolia and Iran and has lived wild for so long that it is protected as a wild animal under European Union law. It lives mainly in the Paphos Forest and nearby parts of the Troodos mountains, among pines, cedars and rocky valleys. Hunting with firearms nearly wiped it out at the start of the twentieth century, when only a small number survived. Cyprus protected it from the 1930s onward, turned the Paphos Forest into a game reserve and later fenced a breeding enclosure at Stavros tis Psokas. Numbers rose to about 1,200 in 1997 and are now estimated at more than 3,000. The mouflon appears on the Cypriot 1, 2 and 5 cent euro coins. Today the main problems are poaching, road deaths, fires and the damage it causes to crops around the forest edge.

Mouflons are small for wild sheep. Adults usually stand about 65 to 90 cm at the shoulder, and males weigh about 35 to 55 kg, while females weigh about 25 to 40 kg. Size changes from region to region: the Cyprus mouflon is one of the smallest, and the Anatolian mouflon of central Türkiye is one of the largest, with big rams reaching around 70 kg. The coat is short and reddish brown in summer and turns darker and thicker in winter. Adult males often have a pale or whitish patch on each side, called the saddle, a dark ruff of longer hair on the throat and chest, and a white belly, rump and lower legs. The horns are the most striking feature. In males they grow from the top of the head, sweep backward and down and then curve forward around the face, forming close to a full circle in old rams. They keep growing every year, adding visible rings that help tell a ram's age, and in mature males they can reach around 85 cm measured along the curve, though most are shorter. Females are smaller and lighter, and in most populations they have only short, thin horns or no horns at all. Mouflons have slim, strong legs and hard hooves that let them climb steep rock with ease.

The IUCN lists the mouflon as native in five countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Iran and Türkiye. In Armenia it lives in the dry mountains of the south, around the Khosrov Forest State Reserve, and in Azerbaijan mainly in Nakhchivan. Iran holds the largest share of the range, from the northwest, where Armenian mouflons live in areas such as Kabudan Island in Lake Urmia and Angouran, to the Zagros and the south, home of the Esfahan and Laristan mouflons. In Türkiye the Armenian mouflon lives near the eastern border, while the Anatolian mouflon survives naturally in a single population at Bozdağ, near Konya, and has been reintroduced to a few other sites. Cyprus has its own mouflon in the Paphos Forest. Mouflons prefer rugged, broken country: rocky hills, cliffs, gorges and gentle mountain slopes with grass, often mixed with oak or juniper woodland, steppe and scrub. Unlike ibexes, they do not usually live on the highest crags, but they always stay close to steep ground where they can run when danger comes. In summer many move higher to find fresh grass, and in winter they come down to lower slopes with less snow. The mouflons found today in mainland Europe and elsewhere were introduced by people.

Mouflons are grazers first. Grasses make up the base of their diet through most of the year, together with sedges and many kinds of low herbs and flowering plants that grow on mountain slopes and steppe. When grass is short, dry or covered by snow, they switch to browsing: they eat the leaves and young shoots of shrubs and trees, acorns, berries, lichens and sometimes bark. In oak and juniper woodlands acorns can be an important food in autumn, helping them build fat before winter. Like other sheep, they are ruminants, with a stomach divided into four chambers. They swallow their food quickly while they feed in the open, then rest in a safe place, bring the food back up and chew it again, which lets them spend less time exposed to predators. They feed mostly in the early morning and late afternoon and rest during the hottest hours. In dry regions such as southern Iran they get much of their water from plants, but they also visit springs, streams and water holes, especially in summer. Where mouflons live near farms, as around the Paphos Forest in Cyprus, they come out at night to eat crops in fields and orchards, which can cause conflicts with farmers.

For most of the year mouflons live in two kinds of groups. Females, lambs and young animals form herds that can number from a few to several dozen, while adult rams live in smaller bachelor groups or alone, often on different slopes. The two sexes come together in autumn and early winter for the rut. Rams then wander between female herds, test them by scent and fight for access. Two males walk away from each other, turn and charge, rising on their hind legs before slamming their horns together with a crack that can be heard far away. Bigger, older rams with heavier horns usually win, so young males seldom get the chance to mate. After a pregnancy of about five months, females give birth in spring, usually to one lamb and sometimes twins, in a hidden spot among rocks or bushes. Within hours the lamb can stand and follow its mother, and it starts eating plants after a few weeks. Females can breed from their second year, while males usually have to wait several years until they are big enough to compete. Mouflons are alert, shy animals with excellent eyesight. When one senses danger it gives a sharp whistle or snort, and the whole group runs for the nearest rocks.

The mouflon is not Endangered, but it is close to being threatened. In its assessment of March 2020, the IUCN lists it as Near Threatened, because numbers have fallen across much of its range and could keep falling. The IUCN does not give a global total, and it describes the trend as unknown: some populations, like those of Cyprus and some protected areas of Türkiye, have grown, while others are small and shrinking. In Armenia and Azerbaijan together only a few hundred mouflons remain, compared with about 1,750 in the 1960s. In Iran, counts are hard to compare because surveys often mix mouflons, urials and their hybrids, and populations such as the one on Kabudan Island in Lake Urmia have dropped sharply. The main threats listed by the IUCN are hunting and poaching, competition with livestock for grass and water, overgrazing, the spread of farms, towns and roads, logging, fires, disturbance by people and diseases passed on by domestic sheep and goats. Wars and military zones along borders in the Caucasus add more pressure. Protection has worked where it is enforced. The Cyprus mouflon recovered from near extinction to more than 3,000 animals, and the Anatolian mouflon of Bozdağ, once down to a few dozen, now numbers around a thousand.