Pronghorn
Pronghorn – with their protuberant eyes, black, white and fawn coats, and narrow-boned legs – hold several records: fastest land animal in North America, with speeds up to 55 mph, one of the only hoofed animals to have evolved in North America, and the longest annual mammal migration within the contiguous 48 states and one of the longest animal migrations to be found between Argentina and Canada.
The Path of the Pronghorn starts in Grand Teton National Park and ends up to 170 miles southeast in Wyoming's Red Desert.
This incredible journey takes place across the backdrop of western Wyoming, with its beautiful landscape and all of its conservation challenges.
The Path of the Pronghorn is sometimes no more than 150 yards wide. In just five years, traffic in areas where pronghorn winter has increased tenfold. Conservationists have seen up to six animals splattered on the road, all killed by a single vehicle. The habitat is being degraded and fragmented, and animals are starting to avoid areas they formerly relied on to make it through the winter.
Energy exploration and resource extraction are seeing a boom across Wyoming. In the Upper Green River Valley, one of the pronghorn's native habitats about 90 miles from Jackson Hole, more than 80 percent of the landscape is leased for oil and gas development. In the next decade, we may see up to 10,000 new wells.
An even greater threat is the proliferation of houses and ranchettes pushing the pronghorn out of open valleys – where they feel most comfortable – and into closed forests – where they feel most vulnerable to predators. ?Another big challenge is the increased number of fences that have popped up in the area over the past 5-10 years. Pronghorn rarely jump fences and passages can quickly become impenetrable by the addition of a single fence.? Pronghorn Hotspot
Trappers Point, Wyoming, a spot where the Green River and the New Fork River swoop within 1 mile of each other, was a bottleneck on the pronghorn migration route before humans were present– pronghorn like to see far and run fast, and will not venture into river bottoms and willows–but now we've made it worse. A housing development and roadways have reduced Trappers Point down to ½ mile wide. Between 2,500–3,500 mule deer and 1,500–2,000 pronghorn move through the bottleneck during the spring and autumn migrations. HWY 191 cuts right through the middle of this narrow path so pronghorn are first forced into a narrow chute and then made to cross a major highway.
Pronghorn Solutions
In 2008, a local land trust won a million-dollar grant to help ranchers replace the bottom strand of fencing with barbless wire and raise it high enough so pronghorn can slip under.? In the gas fields, the solutions aren't as easy as switching out fencing, but there are new ways to at least mitigate the impact: directional drilling allows wells to be clustered 25 or more on a single pad, and piping instead of trucking out the fluids produced in the wells saves tens of thousands of truck trips a year. ?In addition, in 2008, the U.S. Forest Service amended the Bridger-Teton National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan to protect 45 miles of the Path of the Pronghorn corridor that are on Forest Service lands. The amendment represents the first federal administrative wildlife migration corridor designation in the United States. ?Also, in 2008, the Pinedale District of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved a plan that designates 9,540 acres around the Trappers Point Bottleneck, an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). This is a special designation that seeks to preserve the pronghorn migration route on a portion of the BLM's lands and is the agency's first ACEC dedicated to wildlife migration.
With a little bit of ingenuity we can give animals freedom to roam.
Inspiring Person: Pronghorn
Joe Riis, a 24-year-old photographer from South Dakota, photographer, is a "Young Explorer" at National Geographic Adventure, and a biologist-in-residence at the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming.? The Path of the Pronghorn is the focus of Joe's life. He lives in the back of his beater pickup, which he drives from one pronghorn area to another, and under the foam mattress he has a life-size cutout of an antelope that he uses as cover to get close-ups. Potentially, the more effective tools in his pickup are his infrared-triggered camera traps. Joe is the first photographer to make close-up photographs of the pronghorn during migration.? Joe wants to photograph the migration, but he also wants to document the threats facing the migration corridor. On BLM land leased to ranchers, he has found one impediment to the migrating pronghorn: fences. Pronghorn's legs are too spindly to jump over them, so they have to crawl under. But that provides a solution: pronghorn-friendly fences with a no-barb bottom wire at least 16 inches off the ground. ?Joe has also photographed housing developments that encroach into the migration corridor, as well as the gas fields at the southern end of the corridor, during two aerial surveys. Here the solutions aren't as easy as switching out fencing, but there are new ways to at least mitigate the impact: directional drilling, which allows wells to be clustered 25 or more on a single pad, and piping instead of trucking out the fluids produced in the wells, which saves tens of thousands of truck trips a year.? Consider that Joe has spent one-twelfth of his life committed to this project.
To learn more about pronghorn,? visit http://www.pronghornpassage.com/
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The Path of the Pronghorn starts in Grand Teton National Park and ends up to 170 miles southeast in Wyoming's Red Desert.
This incredible journey takes place across the backdrop of western Wyoming, with its beautiful landscape and all of its conservation challenges.
The Path of the Pronghorn is sometimes no more than 150 yards wide. In just five years, traffic in areas where pronghorn winter has increased tenfold. Conservationists have seen up to six animals splattered on the road, all killed by a single vehicle. The habitat is being degraded and fragmented, and animals are starting to avoid areas they formerly relied on to make it through the winter.
Energy exploration and resource extraction are seeing a boom across Wyoming. In the Upper Green River Valley, one of the pronghorn's native habitats about 90 miles from Jackson Hole, more than 80 percent of the landscape is leased for oil and gas development. In the next decade, we may see up to 10,000 new wells.
An even greater threat is the proliferation of houses and ranchettes pushing the pronghorn out of open valleys – where they feel most comfortable – and into closed forests – where they feel most vulnerable to predators. ?Another big challenge is the increased number of fences that have popped up in the area over the past 5-10 years. Pronghorn rarely jump fences and passages can quickly become impenetrable by the addition of a single fence.? Pronghorn Hotspot
Trappers Point, Wyoming, a spot where the Green River and the New Fork River swoop within 1 mile of each other, was a bottleneck on the pronghorn migration route before humans were present– pronghorn like to see far and run fast, and will not venture into river bottoms and willows–but now we've made it worse. A housing development and roadways have reduced Trappers Point down to ½ mile wide. Between 2,500–3,500 mule deer and 1,500–2,000 pronghorn move through the bottleneck during the spring and autumn migrations. HWY 191 cuts right through the middle of this narrow path so pronghorn are first forced into a narrow chute and then made to cross a major highway.
Pronghorn Solutions
In 2008, a local land trust won a million-dollar grant to help ranchers replace the bottom strand of fencing with barbless wire and raise it high enough so pronghorn can slip under.? In the gas fields, the solutions aren't as easy as switching out fencing, but there are new ways to at least mitigate the impact: directional drilling allows wells to be clustered 25 or more on a single pad, and piping instead of trucking out the fluids produced in the wells saves tens of thousands of truck trips a year. ?In addition, in 2008, the U.S. Forest Service amended the Bridger-Teton National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan to protect 45 miles of the Path of the Pronghorn corridor that are on Forest Service lands. The amendment represents the first federal administrative wildlife migration corridor designation in the United States. ?Also, in 2008, the Pinedale District of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved a plan that designates 9,540 acres around the Trappers Point Bottleneck, an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). This is a special designation that seeks to preserve the pronghorn migration route on a portion of the BLM's lands and is the agency's first ACEC dedicated to wildlife migration.
With a little bit of ingenuity we can give animals freedom to roam.
Inspiring Person: Pronghorn
Joe Riis, a 24-year-old photographer from South Dakota, photographer, is a "Young Explorer" at National Geographic Adventure, and a biologist-in-residence at the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming.? The Path of the Pronghorn is the focus of Joe's life. He lives in the back of his beater pickup, which he drives from one pronghorn area to another, and under the foam mattress he has a life-size cutout of an antelope that he uses as cover to get close-ups. Potentially, the more effective tools in his pickup are his infrared-triggered camera traps. Joe is the first photographer to make close-up photographs of the pronghorn during migration.? Joe wants to photograph the migration, but he also wants to document the threats facing the migration corridor. On BLM land leased to ranchers, he has found one impediment to the migrating pronghorn: fences. Pronghorn's legs are too spindly to jump over them, so they have to crawl under. But that provides a solution: pronghorn-friendly fences with a no-barb bottom wire at least 16 inches off the ground. ?Joe has also photographed housing developments that encroach into the migration corridor, as well as the gas fields at the southern end of the corridor, during two aerial surveys. Here the solutions aren't as easy as switching out fencing, but there are new ways to at least mitigate the impact: directional drilling, which allows wells to be clustered 25 or more on a single pad, and piping instead of trucking out the fluids produced in the wells, which saves tens of thousands of truck trips a year.? Consider that Joe has spent one-twelfth of his life committed to this project.
To learn more about pronghorn,? visit http://www.pronghornpassage.com/
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