05/31/2026
In 1970, New Mexico released fifteen wild goats from Iran into a ten-mile desert mountain range near the Mexican border. The population exploded to over a thousand animals. Fifty-five years later, an aerial survey using thermal cameras counted 185.
The Florida Mountains sit outside Deming in southern New Mexico. Hunters call them the Rock. The range is compact and brutal, roughly ten miles long and five miles wide, rising sharply out of the flat Chihuahuan Desert with steep cliff faces, sharp ridgelines, and enough broken rock to make a man on foot question every step. From the highway, the mountains look barren. Up close, they hold springs, seeps, and enough browse to support an animal that was designed for exactly this kind of terrain on the other side of the world.
The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish imported fifteen Persian ibex from Iran and released them into the Floridas in 1970. Shortly after, another twenty-seven were added. The Persian ibex, also called the bezoar ibex, is regarded as the ancestor of the domestic goat. It stands about thirty inches at the shoulder. Males weigh up to 110 pounds. Females run about sixty. Both sexes grow horns, but the males carry scimitar-shaped curves that can exceed fifty inches, sweeping back over the body in arcs that look engineered for a museum display case rather than a living animal.
The ibex took to the Rock immediately. The terrain matched their evolutionary spec sheet so precisely that within four years the population was large enough to hunt. New Mexico opened the first public ibex season in 1974. The hunt became one of the most sought-after tags in the state, a once-in-a-lifetime draw with odds under five percent.
What makes the ibex story different from every other wildlife introduction story on this page is that the animal was never supposed to be here at all. This was not a native species restored to its historic range. There were no Persian ibex in North America before 1970. There were no Persian ibex anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. New Mexico deliberately placed a Middle Eastern cliff goat into a desert mountain system because the habitat geometry matched and the state wanted an exotic big-game opportunity. The Florida Mountains became the only location in the Western Hemisphere where pure, unfenced, free-ranging Persian ibex exist in the wild.
The animals earned their reputation through the terrain they chose to live in. A NMDGF biologist who conducts the annual aerial helicopter survey described watching ibex outmaneuver the helicopter while literally running across a sheer cliff. During surveys, groups of ibex have been photographed ducking into small caves located high in cliff faces that no person could reach without climbing gear. The ibex stand thirty inches tall and weigh less than a large dog, but they move across vertical rock with the mechanical confidence of an animal that has been doing it for a few million years longer than anything native to New Mexico.
The population peaked above a thousand animals. The department managed the herd through hunting, maintaining a target of 350 to 500 ibex in the Floridas. The ibex were kept strictly within the mountain range. Game biologists managed them carefully to prevent them from spreading into adjacent ranges, primarily because Persian ibex can carry pneumonia that could devastate New Mexico's native desert bighorn sheep populations.
Then the numbers started falling.
Stewart Liley, head of the NMDGF Wildlife Division, told commissioners in January 2026 that the ibex population is far below desired levels. The April 2024 aerial survey using thermal imaging cameras counted 185 animals on the mountain. Groups of hundreds that hunters used to glass from the desert floor have been replaced by groups of five. Out of roughly 300 licenses issued in the most recent season, hunters killed ten males and one female. Hunter satisfaction is down. Liley said the department will propose significant permit reductions.
The cause of the decline is not definitively established in the public record. Desert mountain populations are vulnerable to drought, disease, predation by mountain lions, and the cumulative pressure of decades of hunting on a geographically isolated herd with no immigration from outside populations. The ibex cannot recruit from Iran. They cannot disperse to a neighboring mountain range without risking contact with bighorn sheep. They are locked onto one ten-mile piece of rock in southern New Mexico, and the population that was once large enough to absorb annual hunting pressure is now small enough that every dead ibex changes the math.
The Florida Mountains are the only place on the continent where a hunter can draw a tag for a Persian ibex and climb into Asian cliff-goat terrain without leaving the United States. Whether that opportunity survives depends on whether 185 animals on one desert mountain range can hold a population that once numbered a thousand, in a landscape where there is no backup herd, no genetic input, and no second mountain to fall back on.
Source: New Mexico Department of Game and Fish / New Mexico Wildlife Federation / NMDGF Wildlife Magazine.
