Once plentiful in the mountains of southern Arizona, by the 1990s desert bighorn sheep were wiped out in the Pusch Ridge Wilderness of the Santa Catalina Mountains as a result of habitat loss and alteration. This book uses their history and population decline as a case study in human alteration of wildlife habitat. When human encroachment had driven the herd to extinction, wildlife managers launched a major and controversial effort to reestablish this population.

For more than forty years Paul R. Krausman directed studies of the Pusch Wilderness population of these iconic animals,...