Prescott Arizona News and Events - Read It News Magazine

Sixty-seven pronghorn antelope have left the area. The Arizona Game & Fish Department recently captured the animals near Prescott and relocated them near Winslow.

To save them.

During the week of Feb. 5, biologists set up the capture on the Granite Dells Ranch, planning movements and erecting nets to funnel the pronghorn into a pen. They made the capture and moved the animals on the same day, Feb. 7, to limit stress to the animals. The 67 pronghorn represented a not-too-shabby 3:1 ratio of does to bucks. Veterinarians gave the animals fluids and drew blood samples, and some of the does got ultrasounds to check for pregnancy. Most of them got eartags and biologists fitted eight of them with radio telemetry collars. Then a truck took them northeast.

“This was, first and foremost, a conservation effort,” AZG&F biologist Jeff Pebworth said in an official press release. “We took some pronghorn from an area where populations are doing well and moved them to an area where a population is recovering from decline.”

The press release focuses on the perspective of where the animals have gone, to an area near Meteor Crater, close to Winslow. Herds there have been in decline, with poor recruitment (offspring that live to maturity). AZG&F has been working for years on habitat improvements there, including grassland restoration and fence modifications. Pronghorn prefer to go under rather than over fences, and using barbless wire on the lowest strand helps them move about.

"The herds in this area have been improving," said AZG&F Wildlife Specialist Tim Holt in that press release. "This transplant is going to play a big role in restoring this pronghorn population to historical levels." The new animals provide, not just increased numbers and opportunities for reproduction, but fresh genes.

Historically, pronghorn moved and migrated freely across the entire state in uncounted numbers that are anybody's guess. The introduction of barbed wire was an immediate and sharp limitation on their free ranging. Removing the barbs from the bottom strand of fence helps allay that somewhat, but it isn't a 100 percent solution. And when you combine roads with fences, you've created an extremely effective barrier that many pronghorn won't pass.

Biologists don't like to speak in absolutes, and trying to get a flat statement from a biologist is as tough as chewing on grilled jackrabbit. The only absolute I ever heard from a pronghorn specialist was from one who studied the animals here for many years. In speaking about the fence-and-road barriers, he said, “No pronghorn has ever crossed Highway 69.”

In permanently separating pronghorn herds, these urban barriers effectively isolate gene pools; there are enough jokes about Appalachia that you know what endless inbreeding will do. What isn't funny is that pronghorn weakened in any way by inbreeding do not survive to recruitment. The world is already tough on healthy members of prey species; throw in a physical or mental defect and all you get is  tender, young coyote food.

For whatever reason – probably localized environmental conditions – the pronghorn herd near Winslow continued to decline while the animals just removed from Prescott are still pretty healthy. But the Prescott animals were on the short end of the fuse of doom, facing the same bleak future as the Watson Lake herd.

Several years back, AZG&F wanted to relocate the Watson Lake pronghorn so that the continued urbanization in that area wouldn't finish killing off the dwindling herd. But nearby residents loudly objected to that proposal. Look at all the water, all the grass, they said; “our antelope” are doing just fine and we like seeing them. But looks are deceiving to the uneducated. Pronghorn don't eat grass, they eat forbs (weeds). The adult animals appear healthy, but the numbers aren't sufficient to ensure a stable population, there is no genetic diversity and the relatively confined space makes it easier for predators to knock off fawns. The bottom line is that the residents have doomed “their” pronghorn to eventual extirpation.

AZG&F backed away from the Watson Lake herd because of the negative publicity; in the recent pronghorn relocation the private land owner surely had that controversy in mind. According to AZG&F, the department wanted to save the Granite Dells Ranch pronghorn from extermination caused by inevitable urban growth in that area, and the land owner agreed on the condition of absolutely zero media attention. AZG&F first mistakenly informed the media of the pending capture, then backtracked and pleaded with us not to publicize it in advance. If that happened, they said, the private land owner would not allow the capture.

The media stayed away, the capture and relocation went well, and now the combined herds near Meteor Crater have a much better chance of survival. The animals wearing radio collars will tell biologists where the pronghorn go and what types of habitat they're using, when and where they eventually die, and generally how the herd fares over time.

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