Mouflon Mouflon The mouflon ("Ovis orientalis orientalis" group) is a subspecies group of the wild sheep ("Ovis orientalis"). Populations of "O. orientalis" can be partitioned into the mouflons ("orientalis" group) and the urials ("vignei" group). The mouflon is thought to be the ancestor for all modern domestic sheep breeds. The wild sheep of Corsica were locally called "mufro" (male) and "mufra" (female). The French naturalist Buffon (1707–1788) rendered this in French as "". Mouflon sheep have reddish to dark brown, short-haired coats with dark back stripes and black ventral areas and light-colored saddle patches. The males are horned; some females are
European mouflon 800. In Sardinia, the numbers in 1955 were around 700, but in 1967 this had fallen to just 300. Through protection programmes, the population rose however to over 1,000 in 1980. In 2015 there were an estimated 6,000 mouflon in Sardinia. The relatively low numbers in Corsica contrast with the rest of the current range of the mouflon. Today the largest numbers live in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Austria and there are still large populations in France, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria. In the introduced populations of Central Europe it is estimated that there are over 60,000 mouflon