Wildlife
Pronghorn Field Day at Idaho National Laboratory
By
Justin Stevenson and I went out into the field yesterday to continue work on Lava Lake Institute for Science & Conservation’s work with the Wildlife Conservation Society on the migration patterns of pronghorn. The project has been examining the movements of pronghorn via radio collars that were attached to several individuals previously. Our task was a to find and recover the four radio collars that had been transmitting mortality signals.
We headed east of Arco to the sage flats of the Idaho National Laboratory, largely a nuclear research center of the Department of Energy, to recover the collars. We had an extremely successful day and found and collected all four collars. Bryan Bybee, of Gonzalez Stoller Surveillance, was indispensable to us as he was familiar with the area and expertly navigated us within a short distance of each collar’s location. Sadly, the collars collected were from pronghorn that had perished, but hopefully the data we collect from these collars will help us to better understand the habits of this unique animal.