Februaky, 1919 
FOREST AND STREAM 
75 
to investigate at close range. The last 
is what happened at our second meet- 
ing. I saw a troop of seven or eight 
bucks and does in the distance, and while 
we were stalking them, a beautiful buck, 
taking us perchance for a new kind of 
pronghorn, came cantering towards us, 
stiff-legged and proud. He stopped 
eighty or ninety yards away from Cap- 
tain Funcke, who on bended knee, was 
watching him along his rifle barrel. 
During the eleven days that followed, 
I saw a total of about sixty pronghorns, 
most often singly, but sometimes in 
groups of two or three. Only once, as 
related above, we saw no fewer than 
eight in one band, two or more of which 
were bucks; and on another occasion 
Mr. Rockwell killed a doe that was in 
company with four other animals. All 
that we encountered, with one exception, 
were hopelessly wild 
— as wary, indeed, as 
even such shy un- 
gulates could well 
be. Moreover, they 
seemed to absent 
themselves for days 
together from large 
tracts of country 
through which we 
had hunted but once 
or twice. Under 
such circumstances, 
our opportunity for 
coming into close 
contact with them 
was very limited. 
Yet it seems worth 
while to record such 
scanty observations 
as I was able to 
make, together with 
brief data gleaned 
from the experience 
of Captain Funcke, 
who, in 1912, col- 
lected the type speci- 
men of the penin- 
sular subspecies. 
A FACT of particular interest with 
regard to the Lower California 
pronghorn is that the season of 
the birth of its young seems to be three 
or four months earlier than the nor- 
mal period for antelopes along the Mex- 
ican border of the United States. Dur- 
ing our hunting in Pattie Basin, April 
1-12, 1915, we frequently observed the 
tracks of does and fawns together. On 
April 4, our Mexican horse wrangler 
shot a fawn which he found sleeping 
among the creosote bushes. Three days 
later Captain Funcke collected two oth- 
ers of approximately the same size as 
the first. 
The three fawns were very nearly 
half-grown. It was evident that they 
had all been weaned, for their stomachs 
were filled with finely-chopped, bright 
green, fleshy leaves, the whole mass be- 
ing in a thick fluid state. I examined 
this pabulum carefully, and found only 
fragments of succulent leaves, with no 
trace of grass. 
Captain Funcke felt quite certain that 
our three fawns had been born not later 
than the middle of February, which he 
said was the normal time of year for 
the Lower Californian subspecies. If 
one were to judge by analogy with the 
fawns of white-tailed deer, the young 
antelopes would have been called at least 
three months of age. Now throughout 
the western United States, and wher- 
ever antelopes occur along the Mexican 
border, June is the month in which most 
of the young are born. Only rarely are 
the fawns known to have come into the 
world as early as May, although the 
birth season may be greatly extended at 
its later end. Dr. Mearns, for instance, 
once observed near the Mexican line a 
doe antelope with two small fawns on 
September 23, and he took both large 
and small fetuses from females killed 
in June. 
Owing to the size and probable age 
of, our fawns, the circumstances under 
which they were taken, and the corro- 
borative evidence of such hoof-prints as 
we saw, there can be little doubt that 
they had been merely temporarily left 
to themselves. The doe antelope’s cus- 
tom of leaving her fawns in hiding, 
usually at some little distance from one 
another, while she forages for herself, 
is well known. Hofer, in Forest and 
Stream for August, 1899, describes with 
what watchfulness and subtlety a doe 
returns to the place where her young 
are patiently awaiting her, concealed 
rather by their own quietness than by 
any cover. He states that the fawns 
go down on their knees, like lambs, to 
suckle, and that if the family becomes 
alarmed while the youngsters are nurs- 
ing or playing, they “drop, as if shot, 
never stopping to fold a leg under them, 
but flattening themselves on the ground.” 
It was in just such a “frozen” posture 
that our Mexican found the first victim. 
In February, according to Captain 
Funcke, the Lower Californian antelope 
does are harried continually by the pesti- 
ferously abundant coyotes, which try to 
steal the young fawns. The tactics of 
a doe in defending her family from a 
dog are sympathetically described by 
Hofer, but no doubt an antelope mother 
would put up a more desperate fight 
against coyotes alone than against a dog 
in the presence of its human master. 
The ecologic significance of a birth 
season four months earlier at the south- 
ern end of the Colorado Desert than 
along various parts of the Mexican bor- 
der is still to be divined. Doubtless, 
however, it has a close relation to the 
growing season of the annual plants, 
and is secondarily connected with the 
extraordinarily hot, dry summer climate 
of the northern Lower Californian des- 
erts. The difference in the time of this 
most important of all functions must, 
of course, affect the antelope’s whole 
life history. It must relegate the rutting 
period to early summer, instead of Sep- 
tember or October 
as in the western 
United States; fur- 
thermore, it might 
be expected to have 
an effect upon the 
season of molt. 
L ittle specific 
information ap- 
pears to have 
been published re- 
garding the food 
plants of the prong- 
horn antelope. Cat- 
on, the author of 
“The Deer and An- 
telope of North 
America,” writes 
that the wild herds 
live on “ buffalo 
gras s,” and that 
captive specimens in 
his deer-park grazed 
freely upon standing 
blue grass, and also 
ate hay. Dr. Homa- 
day, of the New York 
Zodlogical Park, 
found the antelopes 
in the Pinacate section of Sonora cropping 
a species of desert plantain (Plantago) 
that grew in the lava fields. The Lower 
Californian animals undoubtedly subsist 
throughout most of the year upon vari- 
ous kinds of sun-cured vegetation, but 
during the brief spring season of verdure 
they seem to prefer tender leafage. Al- 
though desert bunch-grass, called by the 
Mexicans “guayeta,” was common in 
scattered patches on the lower slopes of 
Pattie Basin, I looked in vain for evi- 
dence that the antelopes had fed upon 
it. Captain Funcke maintained that 
they ate no grass at any season of the 
year. The foliage of the trailing, lav- 
ender-flowered “four o’clock,” Abronia 
villosa, which grew in sandy parts of 
the Pattie Basin, was a favorite for- 
age. Another plant that they crushed 
and mouthed, apparently for the mois- 
ture it contained, was the desert broom- 
rape, Orobanche multiflora, a parasite on 
the roots of other species. We found 
many of its flowering heads, uprooted 
and chewed, in the wake of browsing 
antelopes. Captain Funcke informed me 
(CONTNUED ON PAGE 88) 
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum. 
Mounted group of Lower California Pronghorns in the Brooklyn Museum 
