It’s been five years since Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) staff specialist Joe Bennett spotted 20 dead bighorn sheep near a guzzler while flying over Southern Nevada. The manmade water source had run dry, and the sheep, reliant on it for water, had died within 40 feet of the failed water source.

“It was the worst day of my career,” he said. “The next day, we were hauling water.”

The situation was, on one hand, an anomaly — Southern Nevada’s bighorn sheep are highly adapted to the region’s harsh climate, and they’ve largely avoided illnesses plaguing other sheep herds across the state.

On the other hand, the death of dozens of sheep represented what climate, wildlife and other experts say they are seeing day after day across the Southern Nevada desert — desert-adapted wildlife feeling the toll of abnormally dry conditions carrying on season after season, and not enough relief through monsoons.

“You start seeing mortality in plants and animals,” said David Simeral, associate climatology research scientist at the Desert Research Institute. “The ones that can move, move. Plants can’t move.”

The Las Vegas area only pulls about 20 percent of its precipitation from the summer storms, Simeral said; but when Southern Nevada misses out on its monsoonal moisture, desert vegetation and animals, despite being adapted to the climate, hit their thresholds. 

The vegetation turns crispy; animals that rely on the vegetation for moisture don’t get it, Bennett said, requiring even more water to digest the dry roughage.

“It’s like eating crackers without a drink of water,” he added.

‘We need Mother Nature to do its part’

Those who spend time in the desert see the nuanced differences between the seasons when the rains come and when they don’t.

“In the spring when we actually get rain, we are actually pretty green,” said Doug Nielsen, conservation education southern region supervisor for NDOW. “Most people don’t equate the Mojave with being green, but in the wet years it is.”

But recently, that green hasn’t come.

“You can drive across the desert and see a difference in a year like this and a year when we get water,” he said.

Plants such as desert-adapted creosote are brittle; there isn’t a blanket of dodder covering the ground. For the sheep, that’s the equivalent of having a poorly stocked pantry or supermarket, he said: “You don’t have the quality groceries here.”

This past winter, state wildlife biologists started seeing a worrying number of bighorn sheep hovering around guzzlers across Southern Nevada, particularly in the Black and Muddy mountains outside Las Vegas. Reliant on the guzzlers for water, the sheep were unable to forage far from the manmade water sources — a bad sign.

So, NDOW started hauling in water, ultimately moving 122,000 gallons of water into various Southern Nevada mountain ranges including the Muddys and Blacks at the cost of $10,000 to $15,000 per day, Bennett said.

The effort marked the fifth consecutive winter of hauling water in for the sheep.

“It’s easier to add water than anything else,” said Nielsen, but it was becoming “truly unsustainable.”

In June, NDOW made news when it aerially captured 139 sheep from Southern Nevada’s Muddy and Black mountains — people were captivated by the $1.2 million project to relocate the sheep to other areas throughout Nevada and Utah. (The project was funded by various nonprofits and foundations.)

And while the department relocated those sheep, there are still hundreds in the Black and Muddy mountains searching for water and forage.

“There’s a chance that come August, we are hauling more water,” Bennett said. 

The department plans to issue more hunting tags in the fall to help lower populations, and it’s likely more sheep will need to be relocated next year.

“There’s only so much intervention we can do,” he said. “We need Mother Nature to do its part.”

The problems in the Black and Muddy mountains are part of a broader issue of ongoing water shortages across the Southwest.

Satellite data shows that groundwater is rapidly declining in the Colorado River Basin. The parched ground absorbs runoff from the snowpack, in part reducing the amount of water that flows into the river. This year, despite receiving a near-normal snowpack, less than half of that water flowed into the Colorado River. 

Up against ever-shrinking reservoir levels along the river, water managers are struggling to come to an agreement on how to divvy up the Colorado River’s dwindling resources before an October 2026 deadline. 

Arizona, a state facing extreme levels of drought and potentially some of the most painful cuts depending on the results of the Colorado River negotiations, could benefit from a proposal by a Los Angeles-based company to pump groundwater from California’s Mojave Desert and sell it to the Grand Canyon State; the plan’s idea is endorsed by the federal administration. 

In the increasingly arid area, there just isn’t enough water to go around. 

‘With wildlife, when the water goes away, it goes away’

Spurred by a seasonal wind shift, the North American monsoon season brings thunderstorms to the desert Southwest and outer areas such as Nevada, Wyoming and Texas. In years with strong monsoons, such as 2022, the ninth wettest in 130 years of recordkeeping, drought conditions improved in many areas.

While there’s still a long way to go in this year’s monsoon season — it runs from mid-June to the end of September — the state saw its 16th driest June on record. The previous 11 months were among Southern Nevada’s driest since 1895. 

And while summer monsoons don’t provide substantial precipitation in terms of reservoir storage, they are needed to provide relief to the region’s plants and animals that can’t just turn on a tap to access water. 

In a region known for its lack of rainfall — Las Vegas averages just over 4 inches of rain per year — some pockets of Southern Nevada have received notable rainfall so far.

In May, the city received about 1.5 inches of rain, breaking a monthly record last set in 1969, and since the middle of June, areas in northwest Las Vegas have received as much as 1.25 inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service. 

But other areas, such as around Harry Reid International Airport, have received just .02 inches since mid-June. 

“The extremes are just becoming more extreme,” Simeral said.

A graph from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that, in Nevada, droughts generally come in multiyear waves, interspersed with a year or two of good precipitation. The most recent graph, which tracks back to 2000, shows a red line over 2025 — if the past few decades are any indicator, Nevada could be at the start of an upcoming, extended dry spell.

That doesn’t bode well for plants, wildlife and people.

“We live in a world where we walk into the other room and flip a tab and water comes out,” Nielsen said. “But the wildlife out on the wildlands, they don’t have that luxury. With wildlife, when the water goes away, it goes away.”