A herd of pronghorn graze along a windswept field on the western edge of Medicine Hat Tuesday. (CHAT News photo)

By Alex McCuaig

Be cautious

Deep snow causing trouble for region’s pronghorn population

Nov 17, 2020 | 5:02 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – Pronghorn might be the fastest land mammal on the continent but like sports cars, they aren’t built for snow – especially without the animal’s natural snowplow, the bison.

Making things tougher for the ungulate built for speeding along the open range is the inability to forage in deep snow and forcing them into any area which has open patches, leading them to gather on snow-clear roads and even into Medicine Hat, says Police Point Park chief interpreter Corlaine Gardner.

“They used to live with the bison and they got along really well with the bison breaking trails through the snow and clearing away the snow so that the pronghorns could get at the forbs, the flowers and the shrubbery that they like to eat. Bison like to eat the grass,” said Gardner. “Pronghorn have skinny little legs and snow this deep is hard for them to get through. So with all the snow that we got this November, they’re challenged.”

Making things even more difficult for pronghorn is that they don’t like jumping fences, preferring to slide underneath them – an almost impossible task when the snow covers the bottom wire or more of cattle fences.

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That can lead to herds being trapped on roads and highways as has been seen in the past few days in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan.

“People really need to be cautious when they’re travelling any roads throughout the area – whether its the highways or back roads,” said Gardner.

And if they can’t find anywhere else to go due to deep snow, they’ll migrate into the city – something which saw hundreds die when a sustained snowpack lasted in the area all through the 2009-2010 winter in Medicine Hat, said Gardner.

Many of them died due to starvation or eating non-native plant species from backyard gardens along with car strikes.