Outdoors: 'Antelope' refuse to die
Last week, we talked about the American bison, one of the few large mammals to survive the extinction event at the end of the Ice Age. This week, we’ll be talking about another Ice Age survivor that we’ve made great progress in saving from extinction: the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana).
That classic American song “Home on the Range” features a verse that says “where the deer and the antelope play.” If you’re like me, you may have wondered why the song talked about antelope since there are no true antelope in the Americas. The song is actually referring to the pronghorn, a hoofed mammal that once lived far and wide across the American plains, from central Washington state’s Columbia River to Mexico and everywhere in between.
Even though they look a lot like antelope, these animals shed their horns every year like deer do, and they have more in common with the giraffe! They typically stand some 32-41 inches tall and can weigh 75-106 pounds. With a top speed of 55 mph, pronghorns are the second fastest of all land animals and can retain high speed over longer distances than any other animal on the planet.
The reason for their incredible speed is unknown, given that no predator in North America today can run this fast, but some scientists believe they have adapted great speed to escape predators they encountered during the Ice Age, like the American cheetah. Cheetah, as you know, are the fastest land animals (68-75 mph).
While speed was the perfect method to escape danger thousands of years ago, it has not worked so well in more recent history. It has been estimated that well over 35 million pronghorn grazed across the grasslands of western North America when explorers Lewis and Clark were making their way through the region in 1804.
As with the bison, they were preyed upon by wolves and native Americans, but neither did much to put a dent in their numbers. As you might have guessed, this all changed with the arrival of Europeans as they began to lay claim to the Wild West. By the late 1800s, little was being done to regulate how many pronghorns were being hunted, and many fell from the hunter’s trigger. Also of issue were that cattle ranches and other human settlements blocked pronghorn migration routes and segregated their habitat into smaller regions.
George Bird Grinnel and other members of the Boone and Crockett Club began to worry when, around 1887, they realized the population of pronghorn was experiencing a severe drop in numbers. In the early 1910s, there were roughly 13,000 animals living in the wild — and decreasing.
According to Grinnel, “The club is much concerned about the fate of the pronghorn, which appears to be everywhere rapidly diminishing.” Things still didn’t look good in the 1920s, when another Boone and Crockett Club member named Charles Sheldon said, “Personally, I think that the antelope are doomed, yet every attempt should be made to save them.”
And indeed, that is exactly what happened. It was not only the Boone and Crockett Club that stepped in to save the pronghorn from extinction, but also other conservation groups, biologists, politicians, presidents and philanthropists. They worked tirelessly to have the government introduce hunting regulations.
They also set aside large and protected plots of land where the pronghorn could live in peace and safe from hunting. With these measures in place, the number of pronghorn skyrocketed. Now more than 700,000 pronghorn roam the Great Plains of North America, and even northern Mexico and southern Canada.
The pronghorn are not completely out of the woods yet. Many of the annual migration routes they need to survive are still broken up by ranches, roads, cities, fences and other human settlements, and populations in Mexico have dropped by 80% in recent years. Thankfully, there are zoo breeding programs, like the one at the Los Angeles Zoo, and other conservation measures in place that will hopefully keep these icons of the American West “playing with deer” for generations to come.
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Contact Christian: animaladventures1314@gmail.com