{"id":40605,"date":"2016-07-07T05:12:01","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T11:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=40605"},"modified":"2016-07-07T07:06:27","modified_gmt":"2016-07-07T13:06:27","slug":"a-pronghorn-fawn-and-a-near-disaster-with-barbed-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/07\/a-pronghorn-fawn-and-a-near-disaster-with-barbed-wire\/","title":{"rendered":"A Pronghorn Fawn And A Near-disaster With Barbed Wire"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m growing weary of\u00a0featuring\u00a0wildlife encounters with barbed wire on my blog\u00a0and I’m sure some of my readers are too (that’s one of the reasons I’ve put this post off for over a month). But dammit, I just can’t stick my head in the sand and pretend this kind of thing doesn’t happen. I’ve\u00a0documented a dead Burrowing Owl strung\u00a0up in the stuff,\u00a0rescued a Barn Owl hanging from it that was eventually released\u00a0back to the wild\u00a0and\u00a0Mia and I recently rescued a Short-eared Owl whose wing was so badly mangled by the wire that its best hope is to be kept in captivity and used as an education bird for the rest of its life.\u00a0I’ve even photographed a dead bat hanging from barbed wire.\u00a0And a month ago it happened again – this time it was a young pronghorn fawn hung up in barbed wire. Barbed wire has been called “devil-rope” for over a century now and for good reason.<\/p>\n

For the more sensitive types please know that there are no\u00a0gory photos here, though a couple of them may tug at your heartstrings. All images were taken in the Centennial Valley, most of them last month.<\/em><\/p>\n

But first a little background.<\/p>\n

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\"barbed<\/p>\n

Montana’s spectacularly beautiful\u00a0Centennial valley is huge and most of it is privately owned by cattle ranchers who must contain their cattle with fences. There are hundreds of miles of\u00a0fences in the valley and nearly all of them are\u00a0made of barbed wire. This five-stranded barbed wire fence is typical but some have as few as three strands and\u00a0others have up to six. Different types of wire are occasionally used but\u00a0barbed wire is the norm.<\/p>\n

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\"barbed<\/p>\n

Some of them have so many strands of several wire types that nothing bigger than a jackrabbit could get through\u00a0(if you look closely you can see another fence in the background). But most fences in the valley are made only of barbed wire.<\/p>\n

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\"elk<\/p>\n

Most larger\u00a0adult mammals like elk and deer generally have no difficulty jumping the wire fences. The biggest danger to them is getting their hind\u00a0legs caught between two closely-strung wire strands at the top of the fence as they’re going over\u00a0and that does happen occasionally but typically they negotiate the fences successfully.<\/p>\n

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\"elk<\/p>\n

Young\u00a0deer and elk\u00a0are another story. This cow elk and her calf (on a hillside, thus the slant of the image)\u00a0became separated by the fence and both panicked until they found a weak spot the calf could pass through.<\/p>\n

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\"pronghorn<\/p>\n

But in the American West the biggest danger of barbed wire for large, wild\u00a0mammals is\u00a0to the pronghorn. Interestingly this species, the second-fastest land animal in the world (second only to the cheetah so it must have very powerful legs), typically doesn’t jump fences. It either can’t or it won’t.\u00a0Usually. In six decades of sporadically watching pronghorn I’ve only seen a pronghorn jump a fence once<\/em>.\u00a0Pronghorn much prefer to find a weak spot in the fence and scoot under it and that’s what they nearly always do.<\/p>\n

This one was caught between two fences lining the road when I approached in my pickup. It panicked as it desperately looked for a spot in the fence it could get through. I stopped and watched and it eventually made it through the fence. But if I’d have proceeded at my\u00a0original speed it likely would have taken a chance on a less open spot in the fence and it could have become entangled in the barbed wire.<\/p>\n

It isn’t an unusual occurrence to find old pronghorn hides hanging from barbed wire. I’ve seen it\u00a0many times myself, especially in Montana.<\/p>\n

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\"south<\/p>\n

This is the South Road – the 30 mile long\u00a0gravel road running east\/west through the Centennial Valley. As you can see it’s a gauntlet of barbed wire for any relatively large mammal caught between the fences on either side of the road when a\u00a0vehicle comes by. Those vehicles include\u00a0intimidating, noisy and huge logging and cattle trucks but even a single small\u00a0car can cause panic in a pronghorn caught between the fences.<\/p>\n

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\"pronghorn<\/p>\n

When there’s no threat the pronghorn seem to accept the fences as part of their environment, as this young fawn was doing as it frolicked near the fence line with its mother nearby. But when a vehicle comes by, acceptance can turn to panic in an instant.<\/p>\n

And last month I was inadvertently the cause of just such an incident.<\/p>\n

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\"pronghorn<\/p>\n

Just over a month ago I was driving the South Road looking for birds when I spotted a doe pronghorn with very young twins in front of me and they were trapped between the fences on either side of the road. As soon as I saw them I slowed to a crawl to allow them to find a spot in one of the fences where they could cross to safety. Eventually the adult and one of the twins made it through the fence\u00a0but the other youngster wasn’t so lucky and was snagged by the barbs.<\/p>\n

I got out of my pickup and approached the young pronghorn slowly and as I did the other two moved off to a safe distance. The fawn was firmly snagged by a single barb under its left front “armpit” and though it struggled to free itself it just couldn’t.<\/p>\n

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\"pronghorn<\/p>\n

A closer look shows that the rear leg wasn’t caught in the wire, only the front one.<\/p>\n

As I reached down to free the fawn I was struck by how tough and wiry “he” felt (I’m really not sure of the sex). I guess I expected him to feel soft like\u00a0some other mammal babies\u00a0but he was far from it. He was bleating like a lamb in fear and the little rascal kicked my right arm hard with his left rear leg.\u00a0Good for him!\u00a0He definitely had his survival instincts intact.<\/p>\n

There was very little damage in that short time – just a little blood under his leg when I\u00a0extracted him from the wire. As soon as I did he was off like a shot and joined his mother and sibling.<\/p>\n

I wish something could be done about these fences. I realize that ranchers have to contain their cattle but it seems to me that with a little ingenuity\u00a0a fence design that’s safer for wildlife could be developed. I know from conversations I’ve had with staff at nearby Red-rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge that efforts are being made to influence local\u00a0ranchers in that direction.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – Another event involving a fawn pronghorn (but no barbed wire)\u00a0on this trip left several of us heartbroken. At dawn I was approaching the South Road from the road to the lower lake campground when a\u00a0pickup came along from the east. I waited for him to go by before I pulled onto the road because I knew I would be going\u00a0very slowly as I looked for birds but I had to\u00a0wait a while because he was\u00a0driving very slowly himself\u00a0(perhaps 20\u00a0mph on the gravel road).<\/em><\/p>\n

But within seconds after\u00a0I pulled\u00a0onto the road I noticed that the pickup had stopped in the middle\u00a0of the road in front of me. Its driver got out, looked behind his vehicle and then walked back to us and he was almost in tears. He was a biologist for the refuge and he had struck a newborn pronghorn fawn in the middle of the road and killed it – the\u00a0youngster had raised its head as the pickup passed over it. Fawns this young instinctively hunker down to hide and the biologist simply didn’t\u00a0notice it. They’re very small at this age – without their long, gangly legs they’re\u00a0not much larger than a jackrabbit.<\/em><\/p>\n

Needless to say that event colored the rest of our morning.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m growing weary of featuring wildlife encounters with barbed wire on my blog and I’m sure some of my readers are too (that’s one of the reasons I’ve put this post off for over a month). But dammit, I just can’t stick my head in the sand and pretend this kind of thing doesn’t happen (don’t worry, there are no gory photos in this post). <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,8,1601,1493,373,360],"tags":[603,555,1550,220,258,263,1551],"class_list":["post-40605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-elk-mammals","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-pronghorns","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","tag-barbed-wire","tag-centennial-valley","tag-fawns","tag-montana-2","tag-pronghorn","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-twins"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/pronghorn-7219-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ayV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}