Antelope herds pass by Havre before fawning season

For more than a month large herds of antelope have been hanging around pastures and fields just outside of Havre, but Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Havre-area wildlife biologist Scott Hemmer said that he expects them to move on and disperse any day now.

Hemmer said that it's normal in the fall and spring to see herds of antelope, as the North American pronghorn is commonly referred to, though it bears no genetic link to antelope. The animals travel in large herds to find areas that aren't being hit hard by cold and snow, usually more southerly areas, for the winter, then return north in the spring.

These herds likely won't stay in their current area for the summer, Hemmer said, but first the animals have to negotiate a path across the highway, the railroad tracks, fences and the river among other obstacles. They generally don't jump fences, preferring to go under the wire he added. They also won't jump through deer pass-throughs in protective fencing, or use the smaller underpasses because they're too tight and dark.

"Sometimes it takes them some time to kind of figure out how or why they want to get across for them to be willing to chance it, for whatever reason," Hemmer said, "I don't know why they aren't (moving on) because it seems to me that one gate's been open for a while (for the herd of about 60 east of Havre)."

It is, though, getting a little late in the spring for these animals to be traveling together, he added.

"I'm not 100 percent sure, but they should start breaking up here soon. They're usually by this time not in quite that big a group anymore, and they're usually starting to split up," he said. "I'm hoping this one will disperse and cross the road - we're getting close to fawning time."

Does, which most often give birth to twins, will start fawning around the end of May, Hemmer said. And they usually separate out into groups of only two or three female antelope before fawning as a safety measure against predators, which can be hard on the fawns.

Adult antelope, with their keen eyesight and speed don't have much loss of life to predators, and they also don't have as much trouble with disease as deer do, he said.

"Winter's a big one," Hemmer said about antelope predation. "I think that's when we've see most of our large drops in numbers is with one of our real hard winters with heavy snows. They're just not built for really deep snow."

They will succumb to the cold, exhaustion and lack of forage in a hard winter, so herds will travel in search of areas where the snow isn't deep. They also have a preference for sagebrush for forage, he said.

Unlike deer, antelope won't winter among the protection of trees or in urban areas, but this is due to how their defense mechanisms evolved rather than some innate independence.

"Antelope are obviously more about speed and vision, and how they evolved as a little bit more of a prairie animal. Where some of the deer traits are more adapted to rougher terrain," Hemmer said.

Occasionally they are found in forested areas, though that's a rare and unusual occurrence, he added. The same goes for areas of human population. They will pass by suburban and urban areas, like these herd have, but not in towns where buildings and landscaping block their field of vision and hamper their ability to run flat out to safety.

"They'll get close to town, but they like a little more open space and good sight lines," he said, which they only get out on the prairie.