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Queens Zoo News
Pronghorn Find a New Home on the Range
Pronghorn, meet bison. Bison, meet pronghorn.
The sleek and the shaggy have been united on a piece of the prairie at the Queens Zoo. It’s just as it should be for these two species—neighbors in their wild habitat on the Great Plains.
New to the Zoo, pronghorn are a type of antelope and the lone member of their family, Antilocapridae. They are the only hoofed mammals to have evolved in North America, and cannot be found naturally anywhere else in the world. The fastest land animal on the continent, pronghorn migrate annually across tremendous distances, at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour. Only the cheetah can beat them on land.
The Zoo’s pronghorn trio zipped into Queens in June at just a few days old. Even on their spindly legs, the fawns were a blur in motion—proving their reputation to be true. The three youngsters, a male and two females, hail from two zoos in Kansas and North Dakota.
Zookeepers have nurtured the pronghorn from their earliest days. In the beginning, they bottle-fed the fawns a nutrient-rich formula three times a day. In September, the keepers began introducing the animals to their new home. Once adjusted, the pronghorn then met the bison in a controlled environment. The integration was a success, and the pronghorn now prance peacefully around their lumbering counterparts. While they typically keep their distance, zookeepers have observed an occasional sniff or lick between the two species.
Pronghorn were once very numerous across the grasslands and deserts of the West, and into Canada and Mexico. Though their range remains similar today, their population size has been reduced some 95 percent since the 1800s. Rapidly expanding gas field development cuts into the migration routes for the pronghorn, and degrades the habitat the animals rely on to get through the winter. Six of eight antelope migration corridors in and out of the Yellowstone ecosystem have already been lost. Soon, the pronghorn could vanish from the land they’ve used for more than 6,000 years.
Protecting Pronghorn
Wildlife Conservation Society field researchers are working to create a permanently protected migration corridor for the antelope. This ambitious project would conserve the most extensive trail of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, and one that has been in use since the end of the last Ice Age. Read more about our work to save North America’s fastest land animal.
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