FAIRBANKS — A lone Dall sheep that has been hanging around the Fort Knox gold mine north of Fairbanks for several months has wildlife biologists scratching their heads as to where it came from and why it’s still there.

“It’s either a ewe or a young ram,” biologist Tom Seaton with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks said after seeing photos of the animal.

As to where it came from, Seaton said all he can do is speculate. The sheep is a long way from the steep mountain cliffs that Dall sheep typically inhabit.

“One possibility is it came from the White Mountains Herd (to the north) and another possibility is it came from one of the herds in the Tanana-Yukon uplands south of the Steese Highway between the Tanana and Yukon Rivers (to the south),” Seaton said.

“There’s a really low density of sheep in there, but there are sheep in there,” he said.

The sheep showed up at the mine, about 25 miles northeast of Fairbanks, sometime in June or July, according to Delbert Parr, environmental manager for Fort Knox.

“The last report I had of it being on the site was about a week ago so it still is hanging around,” Parr said on Friday. “It obviously likes what it has found.”

Finding food shouldn’t be a problem around the mine, Seaton said.

“All they need is some grasses, and there’s a lot of that at the mine because of the disturbed habitat at Fort Knox,” he said.

Likewise, there probably aren’t a lot of predators like wolves or bears hanging around the mine because of all the human activity, Seaton said.

Tom Taylor, a field mechanic for Caterpillar in Fairbanks, was at the mine working on equipment early last month when he spotted the sheep and snapped some photos on his cell phone.

“It was just grazing around,” Taylor said. “It was cool.”

The sheep would have had to travel at least 30 miles from the White Mountains to reach the mine and twice that to get there from the Tanana-Yukon uplands, also known as the Fortymile country, Seaton said.

“It could have come down across Far Mountain and across Chena Dome and made it to Fort Knox pretty easily,” the biologist said. “Single sheep do make forays like that.

“We don’t know what drives that, but that’s how sheep inhabit new country,” Seaton said.

This summer, for example, there were two different sightings from reliable sources of a ewe in the Sawtooth Mountains north of Minto, where no sheep have existed in the past, Seaton said. There also was a sighting by some hunters of a sheep just north of the Yukon River, another place where no sheep have resided in the past.

A young ram fitted with a radio collar in the White Mountains about five years ago as part of a research project traveled several miles to the Elliott Highway before returning to its herd, Seaton said. The same sheep did the same thing the next year, he said.

Parr said the Fort Knox sheep isn’t fazed by humans or the heavy equipment at the mine.

“It’s growing quite friendly at times with people and equipment,” he said. “It gets right out on our haul road at times. People claim to have been up to 10 or 15 feet from the animal and it just seems to look at them.”

That kind of bold behavior is worrisome to Seaton.

“My main hope is that nobody feeds it,” he said, adding that feeding wildlife is illegal. “My prediction is it’s going to return at some point to where it came from, but if the sheep decides that’s a good spot it might decide to stay there.”