{"id":83253,"date":"2020-03-26T06:36:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T12:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=83253"},"modified":"2020-03-26T12:17:10","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T18:17:10","slug":"an-image-request-and-a-rerun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/26\/an-image-request-and-a-rerun\/","title":{"rendered":"An Image Request And A Rerun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I received a request from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to use one of my photos of a pronghorn fawn snagged in a barbed wire fence for an interpretive panel about the impacts of development on wildlife. They found that photo in one of my older blog posts. In the process of confirming precisely which image they were interested in I read that post again last night for the first time in almost four years.<\/em><\/p>\n

I think it’s an interesting and thought provoking post worthy of a rerun so today I’m publishing it again, which is something I do occasionally. For this version I’ve cleaned up the formatting and edited some of the text. The original post was published on July 7, 2016. <\/em><\/p>\n

Apologies to long time veterans of Feathered Photography who have seen it before.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I’m growing weary of featuring wildlife encounters with barbed wire on my blog and I’m sure some of my readers are too, which is why 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 documented a dead Burrowing Owl strung up in the stuff, rescued a Barn Owl hanging from it that was eventually released back to the wild and Mia 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. I’ve even photographed a dead bat hanging from barbed wire. And 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 gory photos here although a couple of them may tug at your heartstrings. All images were taken in Montana’s Centennial Valley, most of them last month.<\/p>\n

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

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Montana’s spectacularly beautiful Centennial 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 fences in the valley and nearly all of them are made of barbed wire.<\/p>\n

This five-stranded barbed wire fence is typical but some have as few as three strands and others have up to six. Different types of wire are occasionally used but barbed wire is the norm.<\/p>\n

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Some of the fences have so many strands of several wire types that nothing bigger than a jackrabbit could get through them. But most fences in the valley are made only of barbed wire.<\/p>\n

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

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Young deer and elk are often another story. This cow elk and her calf (on a hillside, thus the slant of the image) became separated from each other by the fence and both panicked until they found a weak spot in the fence the calf could pass through.<\/p>\n

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But in the American West the biggest danger of barbed wire for large, wild mammals is to 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. Usually. In six decades of sporadically watching pronghorn I’ve only seen a pronghorn jump a fence a single time. Pronghorn much prefer to find a weak spot in the fence and scoot under it and that’s what they nearly always do.<\/p>\n

When I approached in my pickup this pronghorn was caught between two fences lining the road. 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 a weak spot in the fence. But if I’d have proceeded at my original speed it likely would have taken a chance on a less open spot in the fence and it could easily have become entangled in the barbed wire.<\/p>\n

It isn’t unusual to find old pronghorn hides hanging from barbed wire fences. I’ve seen it many times myself, especially in Montana but also in Wyoming and Utah.<\/p>\n

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This is the South Road, the 30 mile long gravel road running east\/west through the entire Centennial Valley. Whenever a vehicle comes by it’s a gauntlet of barbed wire for any large mammal caught between the fences on both sides of the road. Those vehicles include huge, intimidating and noisy logging and cattle trucks but even a single small car can cause panic in a pronghorn caught between the fences.<\/p>\n

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When there’s no threat from vehicles pronghorn seem to accept the fences as part of their environment, just as this young fawn was doing as it frolicked near the fence line with its mother nearby. But when a vehicle comes along, 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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Just over a month ago I was driving the South Road looking for birds when I spotted a doe pronghorn with very young twin fawns 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 but the other youngster wasn’t so lucky and was snagged on the bottom wire of the fence.<\/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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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 didn’t take the time to determine sex). I guess I expected him to feel soft like some other mammal babies but 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. Good for him! His survival instincts were definitely intact.<\/p>\n

Thankfully very little damage had been done in that short time, just a little blood under his left front leg when I extracted him from the wire. As soon as he was free he was off like a shot and joined his mother and sibling.<\/p>\n

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I wish something could be done about these fences. I realize that ranchers have to contain their livestock but it seems to me that with a little effort and ingenuity a 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 ranchers in that direction.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – Another event involving a fawn pronghorn (but no barbed wire) on this trip left us heartbroken. Precisely at dawn I was approaching the South Road from the road to the lower lake campground when a pickup 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 very slowly as I looked for birds but I had to wait a while because he was driving very slowly himself (perhaps 20 mph on the gravel road).<\/p>\n

But within minutes after I pulled onto the road I noticed that the pickup had stopped in the middle of 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 laying in the middle of the road and killed it – the youngster had raised its head as the pickup passed over it. Fawns this young instinctively hunker down to hide and the biologist simply didn’t notice it. They’re very small at this age – without their long, gangly legs they’re not much larger than a jackrabbit.<\/p>\n

Needless to say that tragic event put a significant damper on the rest of our day.<\/p>\n

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Notes:<\/em><\/p>\n