In Pursuit of the Pronghorn

My biologist father’s fascination with the prairie antelope helped me understand him better.

- Alanna Mitchell

One of the rare disagreements between my parents came early in their marriage. My dad, George Mitchell, a biologist, had shot a magnificent buck pronghorn, had its head taxidermied, and then wanted to give him pride of place in my mother’s elegant living room.

My mother, Constance Mitchell, a modern painter who carefully curated her surroundings, was horrified. Immune to Dad’s protestations that this pronghorn was, as he wrote in his journal, a “museum-quality specimen,” she banished the stuffed beast to the rec room in the basement, where it became a quizzical witness to our family life.

My dad, who died in June 2017 at 91, loved that pronghorn. But not just that one. He loved the whole species, Antilocapra americana. In his book, The Pronghorn Antelope in Alberta, my dad refers to his passion as an affair of the heart that never lost its fire. Maybe it was the lure of the unknown. The pronghorn was a scientific mystery when my dad was hired as the Alberta government’s first game biologist in 1952.

Even the basics were obscure. How many young did pronghorns have? What did they eat? How did they survive the winters? How many were there in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the northernmost tip of its continent-wide range? How many had there been?

Unknown. And unless you knew this information, how could you predict whether they would stick around? He set about the life-consuming, painstaking business of finding out.

THE PRONGHORN’S ancestor evolved in North America around 25 million years ago. Eventually, that ancestor, Merycodus, spawned about a dozen species of hooved grazers, from one the size of a jackrabbit to the lone survivor, which became swift enough to race the hungry cheetahs and hyenas that then populated this continent.