We’re deep in the desert with the engine off. No sooner do we start to drive again than the fastest animal in America, the pronghorn, bolts out of the brush. I had been hoping to see one. White- and chestnut-colored, deep-chested and springy, it runs directly across the rutted track in front of the truck — and in an instant, it is gone.
“Robust,” is James Atkinson’s first comment. “They don’t stop and look back like a deer does. They keep going.” Atkinson works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. He heads the recovery team for the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, which some call an antelope, though technically it is not. A subspecies of the widespread North American pronghorn, it was first listed as endangered in 1967.
Twelve years ago, the U.S. population of Sonoran pronghorn fell to just 21 animals. Thanks to a captive breeding program, which maintains some of the pronghorn in a 1-square-mile pen with periodic releases into the refuge, the number of pronghorn in the wild here has grown to about 200. A second population of 30 animals was recently established at the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, about 90 miles north. Several hundred others live across the border in Mexico.
The buck we have flushed is probably still running; speeds of up to 60 mph have been recorded. Atkinson does not seem to be a romantic sort, but when he describes a herd of 20 or 30 pronghorn traveling through the desert, he gets a lilt in his voice. “Like bison, they’re a range animal. When they have to move, they go. They go where they need to go, and they go as a group.”
Unfortunately they cannot roam freely anymore. To the west, toward the Lower Colorado Valley, the terrain is extremely dry “and they prefer not to go there,” says Atkinson, while in other directions “they’re bracketed on three sides.” Highways to the north and east, interstates 10 and 8, and Arizona Route 85, are barriers to migration, while the pronghorn are cut off from the herds to the south by the international border and another highway in Mexico. The pronghorn on Cabeza Prieta are confined to an island of cactus, mesquite and creosote bush. It’s a large island, to be sure, about 1.6 million acres, but the habitat is so harsh that a successful recovery would be a herd of 300 animals.
