The fleeting lives of pronghorns

PARCHED GOLD HILLS roll out around the Carrizo Plain, encircling the valley like a giant bowl. From anywhere here, you can see just about anywhere else. This is California antelope country, and a century ago it might have teemed with pronghorns like an American Serengeti.

Bob Stafford, area biologist, leads me up a dirt road to search for a herd in the foothills. From a ridgeline he spots a cluster of tiny brown spots. Through binoculars we see their bodies tense, their heads turn toward us. They have seen us. Wary, they slink into the cover of nearby sunflowers, barely visible amid the blooms.

Down the road and moments later, Stafford points out a juvenile veiled in a patch of rattlesnake weed. Then several more materialize, their brownish hides emerging against the tawny hillside only under the scrutiny of our gaze. They are not easy to see. Only their white rumps are distinguishable, and that’s usually when they’re running away from you.

The fastest land animal in North America, pronghorns can sprint over 50 miles per hour. During the Pleistocene, armed with vision comparable to eight-power binoculars, they outpaced some of the most monstrous carnivores the world had ever seen -- hulking North American cheetahs, giant hyenas and saber-tooth cats.

But though they eluded these prehistoric predators, they couldn’t escape the 19th century threats of hunters’ bullets and ranchers’ barbed wire. But today, these magnificent creatures, these icons of the West that hide in the open, are disappearing from sight.

Half a million pronghorns may have roamed California’s plains and inland valleys at the time of Spanish conquest. Now there are fewer than 1% as many. About 4,400 remain in Modoc County, and a few hundred in Southern California, including 87 on the Carrizo Plain, just north of the Los Padres National Forest.

Stafford guides me to another herd hunkered down on a farm field just outside the monument. As I approach, they stiffen, then sprint lightly to adjacent ground where they sit and munch morning glory. The word “fleet” comes to mind as I watch them glide over the landscape. I look up the definition when I get home: 1. to move or pass swiftly; 2. to fade out; vanish. Both fit.

After several failed attempts to relocate pronghorns in Southern California, wildlife officials and conservationists lost heart. Strike up a chat over coffee or a campfire, and you’ll hear advocates muse about returning the species to grasslands around the state. Ask for a plan, and you’ll hear why it’s not possible.

There are too few open spaces and too few animals to move, they say. The Modoc herd is languishing, and neighboring subspecies in Arizona or Baja are endangered.

But as Stafford and I lean over the fence watching pronghorns chomp weeds in a fallow field in the distance, it appears they aren’t so fragile -- just overlooked.

“Antelope need a champion,” said Jim Yoakum, a retired federal biologist who has spent his entire career, and over half a century, studying and managing the animals. “They need someone to go to bat for them, to fight the political [powers], fight the ranchers. If you don’t have that, I think antelope will go down the drain.”

One such champion was Marlene Braun, the late manager of the Carrizo Plain National Monument. Braun dared to limit grazing permits in the monument, to say in essence that pronghorns and tule elk may take precedence over cattle. Then last spring, she took her life under the pressure of that difficult stance.

Another champion is Kevin Clark, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who spends his time scouting sites for pronghorn reintroductions. Excellent spots still exist, tucked amid public lands and dairy farms of Riverside and San Diego counties, he said. A captive breeding program in Baja California could provide pronghorns for transplant.

But too many battle-weary biologists and environmentalists can’t see out of their trenches.

“A lot of naturalists in Southern California have spent their whole life fighting against development and loss of open space, fighting to keep what they have,” Clark said. “So they haven’t had a chance to sit back and think about what they could have if they brought back all the pieces that are missing.”

On the Carrizo Plain, Stafford and his colleagues are trying to put back those pieces. They’re limiting grazing and pulling up fences that trap antelope. And they’re studying how each part in the ecological mosaic affects the others.

Their work appears to have paid off. Pronghorns and tule elk, as well as endangered kit fox and kangaroo rats are recovering. Seventeen pronghorn fawn survived in 2004, compared with only one the year before. This year, 20 made it through the summer.

In a recent edition of the journal Nature, a group of scientists propose to introduce African elephants and even cheetahs and lions to American Great Plains. Their plan would create a wide-open landscape of roving megafauna that the journal editor fondly dubs “Pleistocene Park.”

Meanwhile, pronghorn, once stalked by prehistoric predecessors of these big cats, lapse into obscurity.

Perhaps it’s more tempting to start fresh with exotic game in America’s heartland than to revive the relics of our own natural history. But it belies a theme park sentimentality toward nature -- an abandonment of the wilderness we romanticize and then neglect.

It’s hard to envision a time not too long ago in California’s past when jaguars stalked deer, grizzlies devoured whale carcasses, and antelope raced at highway speeds in herds of hundreds. It strains the mind to imagine the stark expanses of Kramer Junction or the sprawling suburbs of Antelope Valley packed with pronghorns, much less hosting the elusive species again.

It probably is too late to squeeze jaguars, grizzlies or wolves in between strip malls and subdivisions. But antelope still have a place among dairy farms and deserts. If we make space for them there, we can return some of the wild to our manicured world.

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Deborah Sullivan Brennan can be reached at outdoors@latimes.com.