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Two of the fastest North American mammals took a mosey threw Wendover Monday on the annual migration north for the summer.
The pronghorn can reached speeds of over 60 miles an hour for over five minutes is the pronghorn is bested only by the african cheetah in a sprint. But while the cheetah can achieve 80 miles an hour, it can only sustain that speed for at best 100 yards, a pronghorn can maintain its top speed for over five minutes.
While there is no living predator that can can even come close to matching the pronghorn on the continent, just 10,000 years ago North America was quite a different story. Then the continent was filled with a host of predators that would have shamed the African savannah: lions, saber toothed tigers, cheetahs, dire wolves, long limbed bears, hyenas were part of the assemblage of carnivores along with the today’s survivors that feasted on pronghorn or at least attempted to.
But the pronghorn out ran them all, even man. The pronghorn survived first the paleolithic American Indians who helped cause the extinction not only of most of the above mentioned carnivores but also of North American mega fauna of mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, camels, horses and the long horned bison. Of the many reasons why the pronghorn survived the Pleistocene massacre one may have been simple, built almost exclusively for speed an adult pronghorn meat is one of the stringiest and gamiest. in other words they are hard to catch and they don’t taste as good as say a mammoth or a dear.
And the pronghorn survived the Europeans although just barely.
First brought to public awareness by the Lewis and Clark expedition by the 1920’s the entire number of pronghorns was estimated to be only 13,000. Protection of habitat and hunting restrictions have allowed their numbers to recover to an estimated population of between 500,000 and 1,000,000.
In the last 50 years pronghorns have recovered almost exponentially and part of the reason like other native wildlife could be due to increased toleration of human beings.
Described as extremely skittish well into the 1950, pronghorns like the recent visitors to Wendover have appeared to have learned that people especially those living in cities pose little threat to them.
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Once disposed of the natural fear of cities pronghorns found for themselves a veritable bounty on lawns, golf courses and parks.
This acclimation to humans and the exploitation of new food sources is not unique to the pronghorn. The once rare desert big horn sheep is an annual winter visitor to Wendover as are mule dear and elk.
While herbivores are tolerated if not welcomed to the new human built oasis predators have also tried to make inroads into areas of human habitation with often fatal results.
While Wendover has not seen the worst of wild animal attacks, trails around some suburbs in California, Oregon and Idaho now warn joggers and hikers of mountain lions and coyotes in the area and campsites not far from cities and towns in utah report frequent bear attacks. Like the pronghorn and the bighorn north american carnivores have also learned that humans posed much less of a threat in an urban setting rather than in the wild but unlike the vegetarians humans have now found a place on their menu.