When Wild Kingdom Met Wild Sheep

Coming Full Circle

By Chester Moore

Long before many of us ever saw a bighorn sheep or other big game species in the wild, we first encountered them through a television program that helped define wildlife conservation for a generation. That truth came back into focus when Ryan Brock, Ph.D., Youth Education Coordinator for the Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF), came across an old episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom while browsing online.

The episode focused on bighorn sheep, specifically, a relocation effort on Montana’s Wild Horse Island. It was vintage television, filmed decades ago, yet it felt immediately relevant. He shared the episode with WSF staff, not for reference, but because it was worth revisiting and reflecting on the work the Foundation does today. For him, the connection was deeply personal.

“I strongly remember watching Wild Kingdom when I was young,” Brock said. “I even have very clear memories of sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair watching it when I was quite young, perhaps around four or five.”

What stayed with him wasn’t just the imagery, but the way the show opened a door. “I believe this show was surely the first nonfiction show I watched as a kid. My family was into the outdoors and wildlife, but this show allowed me to continue to learn about wildlife from my home when my parents were not present,” he said.

The episode he rediscovered first aired in 1975, and the original program continued into the mid-1980s, with reruns giving many of us the chance to see adventures that aired before we were born.

Learning to See the Wild

For many, Wild Kingdom introduced the natural world authentically and prompted viewers to pay closer attention.

I remember watching it intently as a child, drawn in by the opening music and the steady, reassuring voice that carried us into places we would dream of visiting firsthand. Even at a young age, the show conveyed something important: the wild was real, and it mattered.

Without realizing it, we were learning not just about animals, but about responsibility. About cause and consequence. About what happens when landscapes change and when wildlife populations fall out of balance. Was this early outdoor television?

Bighorn Sheep on Wild Horse Island

The episode Brock shared focused on a real conservation challenge unfolding on Wild Horse Island, a rugged island rising from Flathead Lake in Montana. As Marlin Perkins explained in his narration, bighorn sheep had been released on the island decades earlier.

“In many areas of the Rocky Mountains, these handsome, sure-footed animals have, over the years, become low in numbers. Just the opposite is true, however, of the particular herd we’re concerned with today,” he said. The island’s habitat, ideal as it seemed, had limits. Food became scarce. The threat of winter kill loomed. “To prevent this, the excess sheep must be trapped and relocated,” Perkins said.

Viewers watched as wildlife professionals worked patiently and carefully, adapting when plans failed, learning from each attempt, and ultimately succeeding by focusing on smaller groups of ewes.

Each sheep was handled deliberately, placed gently into canvas transport boxes, flown by helicopter to the lake’s edge, and transported to a new habitat on the mainland.

This was, without question, one of the earliest translocations of bighorn sheep broadcast on a national platform. These very kinds of movements of sheep have been supported by WSF, its chapters, and affiliates for decades and have been key to restoring numbers where disease and other threats had eliminated them.

Throughout the episode, Perkins returned to a central idea: conservation is rarely simple, but it is always intentional.

Throughout the episode, Perkins emphasized that the situation on Wild Horse Island was not about spectacle, but about wildlife management, recognizing when animal numbers exceed what the land can support and taking careful, deliberate action to prevent a crisis. Did this dispel the myth that all wildlife can manage itself because it’s in its nature? A lesson many clearly struggle with today.

Bighorn rams on Wild Horse Island by Victor Clark

Modern-day herd of bighorn rams on Montana's Wild Horse Island. Courtesy L. Victor Clark.

People Working Together

The episode was introduced by Peter Gros, who at the time was not yet a regular part of Wild Kingdom, but who would later become one of the most enduring figures associated with the program and who today serves as co-host of the modern continuation of the series, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild.

Years later, Gros would take part in a bighorn sheep conservation project in California, gaining firsthand experience with the kind of collaborative wildlife conservation work that Wild Kingdom had highlighted decades earlier. Seen this way, the Wild Horse Island episode underlines a theme that still guides wild sheep conservation today: meaningful progress is achieved when people work together for wildlife and habitat.

Mentorship in the Field

Over time, popular culture distilled Wild Kingdom into an easy joke: “While Jim wrestles the anaconda…”

The humor worked because it reflected a pattern viewers recognized: Marlin Perkins explaining the situation while the younger Jim Fowler stepped forward to handle the most physically demanding work. But that pattern was not avoidance. It was mentorship. Perkins was deeply experienced, having spent decades as a zookeeper, wildlife administrator, and field naturalist before television ever entered the picture. Fowler was younger, exceptionally capable, and already seasoned by years of work in Africa and South America. Perkins understood when to lead and when to trust the next generation.

Fowler himself explained it best. “Johnny Carson used to say that I was the only person Marlon Perkins could find who would do what he said to do,” Fowler said. But he was quick to add context. “Marlon was a real outdoors type. I never saw Marlon Perkins raise a problem or give a problem the whole time. He was very happy with what he did. He was a real gentleman.”

What viewers witnessed was more than adventure; it was the responsible passing of conservation values from one generation to the next.

The Anaconda, Remembered

One of the most enduring stories from Fowler’s adventures was an encounter with a massive anaconda in the Amazon.

When villagers brought the snake into camp, Fowler knew immediately how serious the situation was. The animal was enormous—“about as big around as a nail keg and twenty-two feet long”—and stressed from capture. Fowler built a pit so the snake could recover at a stable temperature before he attempted to get an official measurement.

When the moment came, things went wrong quickly. The snake seized his hand and began pulling him inward, eventually swallowing his arm up to the shoulder. Fowler knew instinct would betray him.

“You’ve got to force yourself to relax and not struggle,” he said. “If you keep struggling, a snake like that has been programmed genetically to just keep tightening up.”

So he did the hardest thing possible. “When I relaxed, the snake relaxed,” Fowler said. Jim Fowler is probably the only man on the planet who could relax in the jaws of a giant anaconda.

Coming Full Circle

Years after watching Wild Kingdom as a child, I had the privilege of interviewing Jim Fowler late in his life, one of his final press outreaches. In fact, the quotes from Fowler in this story come from that very interview. It was the only time I can remember conducting an interview when a tear quietly ran down my cheek. It was because of what the program had meant to me, and to so many others. That conversation clarified Wild Kingdom’s ultimate message: it aimed not just to entertain, but to teach people about their relationship to nature and why caring for it matters.

I later had the opportunity to meet Peter Gros as he spent time with children in a program my wife, Lisa, and I founded to help kids who need connection, healing, and hope through wildlife encounters. Watching him speak with them, using wildlife as a bridge, felt like seeing the legacy of Wild Kingdom alive and well.

Ryan Brock’s rediscovery of that old bighorn sheep episode served as a reminder of where many connections to wildlife first took shape. For some, those early moments eventually led to careers in conservation. For others, they fostered a lifelong appreciation for wild sheep and wild places, expressed through advocacy or simply a deeper respect for the natural world.

That is the enduring power of Wild Kingdom. It didn’t tell people what their role should be, but it did invite them to care.

Today, bighorn sheep still move across Wild Horse Island, just as they did when that Wild Kingdom episode was filmed.

The landscape is still there, the challenges are still there, and so is the need for people who care enough to stay involved, whether that means working in conservation, supporting organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation, or simply taking time to appreciate those who brought us these stories many years ago.

For a more recent view of wild sheep conservation in action and the nursery herd still on Wild Horse Island, watch Return to the Tendoys.

Contributing Author: Chester Moore is an award-winning wildlife journalist, wildlife photographer, and lifelong hunter from Texas. He operates the Higher Calling Wildlife® blog and podcast and contributes to many outdoors publications.