![]() 300 Winchester’s bullet will be about 3 inches below the line of sight at 250 yards. Towsley, “American Hunter” field editor, describes some of the finer points of long-distance shooting. Then we came up with a plan to get within 250–300 yards for a shot. We tried to spot pronghorn a half mile or more away. Our first day of pronghorn hunting mostly entailed driving around glassing sections (a section is a one-square-mile area, which contains 640 acres, with thirty-six sections making up one survey township). Lucky for us, the pronghorn harvest percentage in these GMUs was well above average, making it a proverbial “antelope alley” for even beginner pronghorn hunters like us. ![]() ![]() We’d purchased late-season (December) tags, good for three game management units (GMUs) in far southeastern Colorado amid the Comanche National Grasslands, which cover some 440,000 checkerboard acres mixed in among private farms and ranchlands. The author searches for pronghorn in southeastern Colorado. When Tim Brass (Backcountry Hunters & Angler’s Southern Rockies Coordinator) and Don Holmstrom (Colorado BHA’s Arapaho National Forest Habitat Watchmen) picked me up in Colorado Springs for a weekend pronghorn hunt on Friday afternoon, we were all antelope hunting novices, wide-eyed at the prospect of pursuing pronghorns for the first time and potentially putting some meat in the freezer for the long winter ahead. And Colorado Parks and Wildlife estimated the 2012 herd at 80,000. In 2011, some 11,700 pronghorn were harvested. During 2010, a record 12,301 pronghorns were taken by hunters, marking the first time the harvest surpassed 12,000. ![]() They are running from ghosts - from cheetahs, long-legged hyenas and other predators with which they co-evolved in North America.”Ĭolorado’s 2008 pronghorn herd was estimated at more than 70,000. It is an ecological anachronism, for there are no current predators (save humans in pickup trucks) that can match their speed. “Wild Earth” contributor Tom Butler adds, “The pronghorns’ dizzying speed is a Pleistocene relict. Slender legs attach to stocky upper bodies, which increase the velocity of pronghorns’ gaits. In his 2003 book, “Built for Speed: A Year in the Life of a Pronghorn,” Byers says pronghorns have a “four-chopsticks-in-a-bratwurst” body type. “That’s why they can run so fast.” Byers, an animal behaviorist, has spent twenty years studying pronghorns in Montana’s National Bison Range. “It (the Pleistocene) was a fearsome environment,” observes University of Idaho professor John Byers, who once raced a pronghorn in his pickup truck, clocking it at speeds of 45 mph over two miles of bumpy prairie. Antilocapra Americana is ready should a long-legged hyena, a swift Arctodus bear or a cheetah be lurking over the grassy horizon.” Not a deer, not an antelope, not a goat, the pronghorn family Antilocapridae originated right here and stayed put for 19 million years - a vestige of a by-gone era. “The only truly and completely American large mammal alive today is the pronghorn. “Wild Earth” contributor Connie Barlow explains why pronghorn are so fleet of foot. They are considered the fastest animal in the Western Hemisphere and the second-fastest land mammal in the world, after the cheetah. They can maintain speeds of 40 miles per hour for several miles and purportedly run up to 60 miles per hour in short bursts. Relative to their small stature, pronghorn have a large windpipe, heart and lungs, making them extraordinarily fast. The Fastest Animal in the Western Hemisphere And only males have a black patch on the jaw below the eye. About 40 percent of females have horns, but they don’t get any longer than their ears and never fork. Unlike true horns (but similar to antlers), males usually shed this sheath after breeding each fall, and then they grow a new one. Sometimes up to seventeen inches long, the horn is composed of a fused hair (keratin) sheath, which covers a bone core. The name pronghorn is derived from the forward projection, or prong, on each horn. Interestingly, pronghorn have a DNA match closer to the giraffe than any other animal. Although many people refer to Colorado pronghorn by this name, their resemblance to the African antelope species (Old World members of the cow family) is only superficial. However, it is, in fact, a mistake to call them antelope. Pronghorn run across the Comanche National Grasslands in southeastern Colorado.Īntelope are a unique North American native.
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