Pronghorns: Speedburners of the Plains
The Pronghorn, also called the prongbuck , or American antelope, is the sole surviving member of the family Antilocapridae of the order Artiodactyla, a family with roots going back twenty million years. It is totally unrelated to the antelopes of Africa and Asia; indeed, they are not true antelopes at all. They have a deer-like body and weigh anywhere between ninety and one hundred thirty pounds on the average. Standing approximately three and a half feet tall at the shoulder, they have quite large eyes that protrude from the head. The tail is only about four inches long and is white or buff colored. The upper body and outsides of the legs are tan to brown, while the cheeks, lower jaw, chest, belly, inner legs and rump are almost always white. Male pronghorns have a broad, black band down their noses, a black neck patch, and black horns.
The horns are not antlers, yet the pronghorn sheds them annually, unlike any other creature. They are comprised of a hollow sheath over a bony core that rises from the skull above the eyes. Shaped like an ancient Greek lyre, these horns are much smaller on the female than on the male, whose pair may get up to twenty inches long. The horns have a short prong that juts forward at the end, and halfway up from the base, giving the species its name.
The Pronghorn lives in the open plains and semi-deserts from southern Alberta and Saskatchewan to the Baja and Sonora Deserts of Mexico. Not found east of the Missouri River, they were first brought to prominence by Lewis and Clark, who saw them by the thousands in what is now known as South Dakota. Their numbers were once in the millions, perhaps more numerous even than bison. Forty to fifty million of them may have once inhabited this land, only to be decimated to a total population of twelve thousand or so by the year 1915. Suffering the same fate as the bison, they were finally protected and the pronghorn began to recover. Presently, estimates put the pronghorn population at two and a half million animals. Pronghorn will live alone or in small bands in the summer months, but they congregate into large herds in winter. They can travel great distances during the course of a year and survive the extreme range of temperatures and weather the plains and deserts offer.
The pronghorn is a high strung fellow, active night and day. They feed on shrubs, grasses, juniper, cacti and domestic crops. In the winter, the desert pronghorns will gladly eat sagebrush. Living out in the open as they do, they need great eyesight and speed. The pronghorn boasts a pair of eyes that has been known to detect movement up to four miles away! The eyes are far back on the head so the pronghorn can graze and keep a vigil for danger at the same time. They have a defensive signal when they feel threatened, a rump muscle contraction that causes the white hairs on their behinds to stand up. Other pronghorn can observe this beacon from as far as two miles distant. They also exude an extremely musky odor when in peril, which can be smelled for more than a mile.
It is the wonderful speed of the pronghorn that makes it such an interesting animal. They could not be caught by the pioneers on horseback, and with the advent of automobiles, they have been known to race with them. There are documented reports of pronghorn bucks running at well over fifty miles an hour and keeping pace with automobiles; one was clocked at sixty one miles an hour. When they flee from predators as part of a herd, they resemble birds in their movements, turning and running as one.
Breeding usually for the first time when they reach sixteen months old, the does normally have a fifty-fifty chance of giving births to twins in early June. Newborn pronghorns are odorless and lie motionless in the grass so as to avoid detection from predators such as wolves, bobcats, coyotes, and eagles. Remarkably, and out of necessity, the fawn will be able to sprint at speeds of up to twenty five miles per hour within a day or two. The first two months of life are critical, with only forty percent of fawns surviving into the late summer months. A pronghorn will live up to ten years in the wild
Another oddity about the pronghorn is that when they encounter a fence, rather than leap over it, they will try to crawl under! The fences that were shooting up as we colonized the frontier greatly hampered the pronghorn’s migration and survival. The efforts to save the pronghorn have been successful enough that some states now allow them to be hunted to control their population. Hopefully, antilocapra Americana will be around for another twenty million years!
