November 2, 2009, 3:30 pm
National Park Service managers are mending livestock fencing at a
volcanic monument in southcentral Idaho to help a herd of pronghorn
antelope along its 160-mile roundtrip migration across the northern
Snake River plain and into Rocky Mountains valleys.
Federal, state and private
groups including the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society began
cooperating on a GPS study last fall to pinpoint the route of hundreds
of these fleet-footed antelope as they travel between the Pioneer
Mountains southeast of Sun Valley to near the Continental Divide along
the Idaho-Montana border, and back.
In addition to rivers, steep
terrain and other natural obstacles, the antelope encounter manmade
highways, housing developments - and fences erected for sheep and
cattle ranching around the Craters of the Moon National Monument,
located 50 miles west of Idaho Falls.
John Apel, a National Park
Service resource program manager, says information from the study about
the pronghorns' migration has been a guide to removing or modifying
fences, to make it easier for the animals to reach summer and winter
range used by pronghorns for thousands of years.
"They are going
this long distance not for the joyride - it's to get some place to
improve their survival," Apel said Friday. "As more and more land is
developed with highways and subdivisions, every one of these is
cumulative in making that migration a bit more hazardous."
This
past year, the National Park Service removed a half-mile of old
livestock fence from the northern portion of the monument; Apel is now
planning to modify fences constructed of mesh wire.
