Here come the young
Right now in a coulee, sagebrush flat or wheat field near you lays a newborn antelope fawn.
It’s that time of year when our large mammal species drop their young, starting with bears giving birth in midwinter while in their dens and ending sometime in early June probably with a member of the deer family.
Right now is the time for antelope to shine. First the name. Of course, they are properly called pronghorn. It’s just that antelope rolls off the tongue lightly, rapidly, like the animal’s pace on the prairie. True antelopes live in Africa not North America. So pronghorn is correct, but it sounds too blunt, like stubbing your toe.
Pronghorns have also been called goats and prairie goats. They are not. It’s likely the name was stuck on them as early as the 16th and 17th centuries by Spanish and French explorers to the New World because these intrepid travelers were seeing an animal that had no equal in Europe. To them it resembled a goat.
William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, described the pronghorn in September 1804 near the present South Dakota-Nebraska border. He wrote, “I killed a Buck Goat of this Countrey, about the height of the Grown Deer….he is more like the Antilope or Gazella of Africa than any other Species of Goat.”
No one knows for sure how many pronghorns existed when Lewis and Clark traveled the West. Estimates vary from 10 million animals to about 40 million.
Whatever number of pronghorn present 200 years ago, by the 1920s a census of the population in the United States recorded 26,700 individuals, of which 3,000 lived in Montana and 7,000 in Wyoming — still the top two pronghorn producing states. Today there are nearly one million pronghorns in the US.
Antelope or pronghorn, they are a fascinating animal with no close relative anywhere on this planet. Scientists have created an entirely new family (Antilocapridae), which the critter has all to itself.
Pronghorn are the only mammal with a horn sheath that is branched (or pronged), shed and renewed each year. All males and about 70 percent of females have horns. The sheath is composed of keratin, similar to our finger nails.
They are the fastest American land mammal. They can run at least 45 miles per hour in a short distance and maintain about 16 mph for longer distances, which is enough to outdistance predators.
If ever an animal was born to be fast, it’s the pronghorn. Even when walking they are bent forward, as if revving up their motor while slowly easing off the parking brake. Within four days of being born, they can outrun a human. Of course, the textbooks don’t say whether that human is an Olympic sprinter or a morning jogger.
They are at home in the sagebrush grasslands of the Great Plains, where they survive by being wary, using their eight-power vision from bulging eyes near the top of their head to take in a view of close to 300-degrees.
Imagine those attributes if you were a teacher — even when you turned your back on the class, you could still see what they were up to.
From this corner of the universe, it’s important to appreciate this wonderful, quaint, unique animal — more important than the name. So you choose: antelope or pronghorn? Some say to-MAY-to, some say to-MAH-to?
Bruce Auchly is the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Region 4 information officer.