Before you begin:

• Using the rope, divide a large area (gym/field/room) into four sections to represent each season: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each section is not equal. Divide the area such that the winter range is about 10% of the total area and each other season is about 30% each.
• Mark some of the tokens with a ‘D’ for disease, and a ‘H’ for hunters. Mix them back in with the other tokens.
• Spread all the colored tokens throughout the seasons but put only half as many of the tokens in the winter range. Keep the numbered tokens face down, so students cannot tell them apart.
• Review Dall Sheep Life Cycle with the students.

Procedures:

• Tell the students that they are going to be grazing or foraging for food. They need to collect as many tokens as possible since they represent food or water.
  
  
• Start the activity in the spring and have all the students stand off to one side of the room. Blow the whistle and tell all the “sheep” to move to the called out season. Have the sheep pick up as many tokens in that season as they can in one minute. After one minute, whistle and have the sheep move to the next seasonal range.
  
  
• Stop the activity after one complete year. Have the students tally up their tokens, noting how many also picked up disease or hunting tokens. For a sheep to survive a year, they must have collected five tokens. If they got a disease or hunting token, they didn’t survive that year.

Extensions:
The activity can be extended by adding more “limiting factors”. Instructors can mark the tokens with different colors to represent limiting factors without revealing what each color means until after the game. For example, make one color pollution. Pollution tokens could be distributed throughout all the seasons or in just one season. At the end of the activity, have the students calculate the percentage of pollution tokens found in the sheep habitat. Discuss how pollution affects sheep survivability. Another variation would be to make food one color of token and water another color. Shortages of one or the other color could represent a shortage of food or water. Discuss the affects of these events with the students.

Suggested Assessment:

• Have students name at least two limiting factors for Dall sheep.
  
  
• Have the students choose a limiting factor and describe how it might affect the sheep population for one year, five years, and 10 years.

Credit:
Adapted from It’s a Sheepish Life!, Wild Sheep of North America, Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks - Wild Education Office, 1997.