Animals: Pronghorns in Oregon

Only antelope in the world are found in Asia and Africa. But the fleet-footed North American pronghorns, tawny, wide-eyed little animals about the size of a calf, were called antelope on sight by the Adam-pioneers. Before those pioneers plowed under the grass of the Great Plains, ”antelope” herds roamed from Texas to Canada, from the Mississippi to the Cascades. Because of unrestricted killing, by 1911 the pronghorns, like the buffalo, were threatened with extinction. But pronghorn herds, now well protected, have staged a reproductive comeback: in Oregon alone, according to the State Game Commission, they have increased tenfold.*

The pronghorn’s amazing recovery is due mostly to State laws forbidding antelope hunting and to the creation by States and by the Federal Government of antelope refuges and ranges. Most important single refuge, because it contains the pronghorns’ fawning grounds, is the region around Oregon’s Hart Mountain. There mounted patrolmen travel over 276,000 acres of sagebrush inspecting the range, watch out for predatory animals and poachers.

By this year Oregon’s pronghorn herd had risen from the 1911 figure of 2,000 to almost 20,000. Last week the State Game Commission opened a five-day pronghorn hunting season outside its refuge, the first since 1911, limiting hunters to one horned animal of either sex but permitting the use of telescope sights on guns. Reason: too plentiful to please farmers, too tame for their own good, many pronghorns have broken bounds, roam nearby ranches at night to steal food.

* Antelope usually have one or two fawns a year.