Pronghorn at Hart Mountain

There's more to Hart Mountain than the scenery. The area's a national wildlife refuge, and the odd creature you see here is the refuge's main event.

The pronghorn is a unique and rather fascinating animal. It's not really an antelope, and isn't a deer, in fact it doesn't have any close relatives at all. It looks a lot like something you'd in the African savanna, racing along with a cheetah hot on its tail, a Discovery Channel camera crew filming it all and dreaming of carnage.

It's not that much of a stretch actually. Until the end of the last ice age, around the time humans arrived in North America, there used to be a cheetah-like big cat on this continent, and (as the theory goes) it was the pronghorn's main predator. No modern biologist has actually seen that in action, of course, but it seems like a reasonable guess given the available evidence. There's no other obvious reason a pronghorn would need to run as fast as it does.

There's a school of thought that argues for trying to restore parts of the North American ecosystem to their pre-settlement state, introducing replacement species from elsewhere as needed if the North American equivalent is now extinct. So, for example, African cheetahs could replace our extinct quasi-cheetahs, so the pronghorn would finally have something to run away from. This is known as "Pleistocene rewilding". A couple of articles in favor (both by the same author) at Slate and Nature, and the inevitable Slashdot story. And the equally inevitable freakout from the righty wingnut-o-sphere. They pretty much blow a gasket over any mention of touchy subjects like "science" or "nature". Sad. Amusing, but sad.

I'm not sure how I feel about the larger proposal, bringing in lions, elephants, camels and more. But cheetahs might be worth a try, at least on an experimental, controlled basis, within a limited range. You wouldn't need all that many cheetahs, and they'd have radio collars, of course, and the usual provisions would be in place if they go after livestock, and all that. If it doesn't work out, so be it, but for my part I think it's at least worth the attempt.



It's fortunate that "pronghorn", like "antelope", is singular as well as plural, since this is the only one I saw. I understand they're actually pretty common across the West, but not in Portland obviously, so I'd never seen a live one before.

So probably someone will show up here from eastern Oregon, or northern Nevada, or Wyoming or somewhere, going, "You saw just one, and it wasn't even running, and you took pictures and posted them on the series of intarwebs!?" To which I can only answer, well, yes, that's pretty much exactly what I did. If you ain't much impressed by that, well, I'm sorry, at least reading this post didn't cost you anything.



Make fun of digital zoom if you like -- and generally you'd be right to -- but that's the only way I got these pics. So two cheers for digital zoom.

The pronghorn ran off shortly after I took the pics. I wish I'd gotten a video clip of it running, but sadly, no such luck.