For The Love Of Pronghorns

The story of a biologist’s lifelong study of an endangered species — and its future

- 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 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 curates 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 promptly became a quizzical witness to our family life. It was so lifelike that it often seemed to me it was simply passing by and had thought to poke its head through the wall, keen to see what we were watching on television.

Dad was right about one thing. Pronghorns are majestic to begin with, but this fellow was something special: inky Y-shaped horns as thick as my wrist, square snout splotched with black, supersized dark eyes tipped with long lashes, a pair of white chevrons running down the buff of his throat. Even after decades on the wall, his ears were pricked so high I could almost feel him listening in on our conversations.

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 1980 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 and began to study it.