Kofa National Wildlife Refuge

The Kofa National Wildlife Refuge is located in Arizona in the southwestern United States, northeast of Yuma and southeast of Quartzsite. The refuge, established in 1939 to protect desert bighorn sheep, encompasses over 665400acre of the Yuma Desert region of the Sonoran Desert. Broad, gently sloping foothills as well as the sharp, needlepoint peaks of the Kofa Mountains are found in the rugged refuge. The small, widely scattered waterholes attract a surprising number of water birds for a desert area. A wide variety of plant life is also found throughout the refuge.HistoryThe name Kofa comes from a former area gold mine: the King of Arizona mine (active from 1897 to 1910), with Kofa a contraction of the name.In 1936, the Arizona Boy Scouts mounted a statewide campaign to save the bighorn sheep, leading to the creation of Kofa. The Scouts first became interested in the sheep through the efforts of Major Frederick Russell Burnham, the noted frontiersman turned conservationist who co-founded Scouting Burnham observed that fewer than 150 of these sheep lived in the Arizona mountains. He called George F. Miller, then scout executive of the Boy Scout council headquartered in Phoenix, with a plan to save the sheep. Burnham put it this way: