Nothing like a pronghorn traffic jam.
Often incorrectly called an “antelope,” the pronghorn is actually a true North American original. Their closest living relatives aren’t African antelopes at all, but rather giraffes and okapi. An okapi is that thing that looks like half giraffe, half zebra, half donkey… I realize that’s three halves, but still… their strange and look nothing like the pronghorn.
Native to the North American west, with small populations extending into Canada and Mexico, they are one of the most uniquely engineered survival machines on the planet, heavily shaped by an ancient landscape that no longer exists.
Pronghorn are the second-fastest land animals on earth, second only to the African cheetah. They can hit sprint speeds of up to 60 mph and comfortably cruise at 40 mph for miles on end. That means there is absolutely nothing in North America today that can run anywhere near that fast. Wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions can’t really come close, which should make you wonder how they got so fast… and why?
Truth is, they evolved to outrun the American cheetah, an apex predator that went extinct roughly 12,000 years ago. The predator disappeared, but the pronghorn survived, and so did the speed. They also have oversized windpipes, massive lungs, and a huge heart designed to pump massive amounts of oxygen to their muscles, allowing them to sustain high speeds longer than almost any other animal.
The Awe-Inspiring Winter Herds
While you might see them scattered in small, loose bands during the summer, pronghorn behavior shifts dramatically when the weather turns cold. To survive the brutal, deep snows of the western plains and mountains, smaller groups merge into massive super-herds… sometimes numbering in the hundreds or even thousands.
Because they cannot survive in deep snow, these large herds embark on massive seasonal migrations to find food. The most famous is the “Path of the Pronghorn” in Wyoming, where herds travel nearly 150 miles from Grand Teton National Park down to the Green River Basin. Wyoming has the largest population of pronghorn by a longshot… with estimates reaching up over 400,000.
Despite being these freak speed and endurance athletes, pronghorn have one fatal, rather comical flaw…. they generally don’t like to jump, and aren’t very good at it. Unlike a deer or an elk, who can easily hop a 5 foot fence (maybe higher), when a herd of pronghorn encounters a standard barbed-wire cattle fence, they will often try to scramble and slide underneath the bottom wire.
This makes modern ranch fencing a massive hazard for migrating herds and conservation groups spend a lot of time and money replacing the bottom strand of barbed wire with smooth wire and raising it to at least 18 inches so these massive herds can safely slide under. Of course, as you’ll see in the video, they absolutely can hop over smaller fences if need be.
This couple was driving near the Wyoming-Colorado border when it looked like a moving roadblock was forming up ahead. They slowly brought their vehicle to a stand still, not because they wanted to, but because they didn’t really have any other choice. The never-ending pronghorn herd was now in control of traffic patterns on this Wyoming highway.
And when it comes to pronghorn herds, they can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and it’s not out of the norm to see a group of 1,000 or so. However, this video blows the typical numbers out of the water. As the person who took the video explained, this great migration included upwards of 20,000 pronghorns all running together:
“Driving home from Cody, Wyoming with my boyfriend, came across this great migration on New Year’s Day. The exact location is State HWY 230 south of Encampment, Wyoming near the Colorado border. At least 20,000 antelope crossing the state highway.”
It’s truly breathtaking to see this many pronghorn at once. The video shows the massive herd somewhat funneling together at a fence, then slowly but surely figuring out that they have to jump it in order to keep things moving. You can see some of the animals jumping while others attempting to crawl to move past the fencing.
The rare situation where the pronghorn proved that you can go over it, through it, and under it.
While the herd figured out the fence and kept things moving across the Wyoming highway, the couple sat back and took in the beautiful, snow-covered landscape that the thousands of pronghorns were traversing across. Nature in motion can be poetry in motion, and that’s proven true in this unbelievable video out of Wyoming.
Check it out:
