Whitebird Summit Lodge
2141 Old White Bird Hill Road
Grangeville, Idaho, ID 83530, United States
+1 208 9831802

Corsican Sheep at the Whitebird Summit Lodge

  • corsican rams
  • corsican rams

Corsican sheep have red-brown, short-haired coats with dark back-stripes and light-colored saddle patches. The males are horned; some females are horned while others are polled. The horns of mature rams are curved in almost one full revolution (up to 85 cm). Mouflon have shoulder heights of about 0.9 meters and body weights of 50 kg (males) and 35 kg (females).

  • corsican rams

Today mouflon inhabit the Caucasus, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran. The range originally stretched further to Anatolia, the Crimean peninsula and the Balkans, where they had already disappeared 3,000 years ago. Mouflon were introduced to the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Rhodes and Cyprus during the neolithic period, perhaps as feral domesticated animals, where they have naturalized in the mountainous interiors of these islands over the past few thousand years, giving rise to the subspecies known as European mouflon

On the island of Cyprus, the mouflon or agrino became a different and endemic species only found there, the Cyprus mouflon (Ovis orientalis ophion). The Cyprus mouflon population contains only about 3000 animals. They are now rare on the islands, but are classified as feral animals by the IUCN. They were later successfully introduced into continental Europe, including Spain, France, Germany, central Italy, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Canary Islands, and even some northern European countries such as Sweden and Finland.

A small colony exists in the remote Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, and on the Veliki Brijun Island in the Brijuni Archipelago of the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia. In South America, mouflon have been introduced into central Chile and Argentina. Since the 1980s, they have also been successfully introduced to game ranches in North America for the purpose of hunting; however, on game ranches, purebreds are rare, as mouflon interbreed with domestic sheep and bighorn sheep.[citation needed] Mouflon have also been introduced into the Hawaiian islands of Lanai and Hawaii as game animals.

Their normal habitats are steep mountainous woods near tree lines. In winter, they migrate to lower altitudes