The Dodge
The white pickup truck thunders North on hwy. 789. It turns West on a dirt truck, bucking over bumps, rocks and ruts. The track turns Northwest, but the truck turns West on to a new smaller, rougher track. It reaches another fork and stops. At the fork is a sign:
“<- No Public Access ->”
The truck hesitates, uncertain, debates internally, and then turns around and goes back the way it came.
The truck comes upon a small cluster of pine trees, surrounded by the rolling sagebrush steppe. The truck slows down, a window opens for a better look, then it stops. The doors open and people pile out. We walk around the trees and search the branches for raptor nests.
Another truck pulls up- it stops- a man gets out. He says that he’s looking for horses (a close evolutionary ancestor of trucks). He leaves.
We find an owl in one of the trees; but we don’t see a nest.
The truck returns to the highway and flies back South. It comes upon a green truck also driving south. The green truck is labeled “Game and Fish”. The green truck flashes its lights and then pulls over to chase some pronghorn, stuck in a barbed wire fence.
Did you know that Pronghorn antelope can attain a top speed close to 60 miles per hour?
It’s a fact.
Pronghorn evolved this incredible speed in order to outrun one of their predators, the North American Cheetah. North American Cheetahs went extinct towards the end of Pleistocene. While antelope have retained their incredible speeds, they are useless against their new modern predators: the internal combustion engine, and the barbed wire fence.
Antelope regularly attempt to race and elude fast moving vehicles; the vehicles often win, but unlike the cheetahs are unable to digest pronghorn (at least for a few million more years).
Pronghorn aren’t good at getting through traditional barbed wire fences. The countless miles of fence out here hinder their migration. Wildlife friendly fences with a higher smooth bottom wire help to mitigate this problem. Marking fences with black and white plastic clips make fences more visible to sage grouse which might otherwise fly into them.
Trucks use gates to cross fences.
Cheers
Zeke Zelman
SOS- intern Rawlins, WY.