The A – Z Challenge; B: Pronghorn Antelope Crossing

(Instead of doing a differently named subject based on the letter for the day, I’m using the letters of the alphabet as hierarchical headings only. I witnessed this (to me) phenomenon on January 13, 2005, and blogged about it the same evening. It was a new experience for me! I reblogged about it back on January 19, 2022, and a commenter then had a video clip to share which I will post toward the end.) BTW, If you’re not reading this on https://thehapswithherb.com/ or from that site on the WordPress Reader, you may be reading an unauthorized copy.

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23797 – 1236
Dear Herbophiles,
Here’s the haps:

About twenty years ago I wrote about a thing that happened when my wife was traveling all over the county taking care of people as a CNA. Since she doesn’t drive, I was her driver. I’ve only ever witnessed this one time, even though we’ve driven that road many times since then. In those days we only had a landline and a flip phone so I never got a picture or video of it at the time. It was one of the coolest, yet strangest things I’ve ever seen.

Because we were late (a different story) I had the opportunity to see something I had never seen before.

Out on the eastern plains of Colorado are herds of Pronghorn Antelope. We would see them grazing many mornings, usually in the fields where the cattle are not. They are small animals compared to deer, a very large buck might weigh one hundred and twenty pounds, and they have a strange gait when they run. It is almost as though they hop in a zigzag pattern back and forth, but very, very fast. They can reach speeds of up to 60 mph. A cheetah can go a little over that but a pronghorn can maintain their speed longer. Their eyes are set high on their head and if you looked through them it would be like looking through 8 power binoculars.

In Wisconsin where I grew up, there are Whitetail deer which I would say are probably two to three times larger. It is spectacular on a frosty morning to see a white-tail buck running across the field at a high rate of speed leaping effortlessly over any obstacle. There is no fence high enough to slow him down.

Pronghorn Antelope don’t leap. They could, I suppose, they just don’t. We saw a herd crossing Squirrel Creek Road, around 5:00 or 5:30 in the evening. There were at least 40 or 50 of them and I slowed the car down and stopped so as not to make them want to stop crossing. It was one of the strangest things I ever saw. Not one of them jumped over the fence, they all crawled under! Someone had told me about this, but I had never seen it. It looked like a river of brown and white flowing under the fence! I stopped completely so as not to spook them and we just watched. It was so strange, because, as I said, I am used to deer. The idea of jumping did not even seem to occur to them any more than you would expect a Whitetail to think about crawling under a fence. They looked like some sort of, I don’t know, maybe rodents or something the way they just wriggled under and kept going. They were moving very fast, however, and if I had tried to come up to them they would have broken their line and scattered.

This clip, from a Wyoming Game and Fish Department trail cam, is seven minutes long but you will get the idea within the first minute or so:

This clip is a news story from a couple of weeks ago. Our city has been growing (in my opinion overgrowing) in the last twenty to thirty years and doesn’t seem to want to stop until we become Denver Junior. I don’t live in the city limits but I am very much affected by the decisions they make. Since a majority of the council members receive campaign contributions from developers (Even though if you point this out you get, “Oh, was that donor a developer? Well, it certainly won’t have an impact on my decisions.” Uh-huh.) the conclusion I feel from this news story is pretty clear:

I’m sorry, dear readers. I don’t like to end on a sour note if I can help it and this almost photograph-quality image was in my archives as well. This is a less well-known part of the West where an occasional discouraging word might be spoken:

Remember The Good Book says, “Where were you when I made everything?”