When I was a child, I recall hearing and singing an old American folk song called “Home on the Range.” Its lyrics speak of a home where buffalo roam and “the deer and the antelope play.” Those words kept coming back to me earlier this month during my brief stay at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.
Over the years I have learned that the song is technically inaccurate, because there are no antelopes in North America. However, the Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) closely resembles the antelopes of the Old World and are known colloquially as “American antelope.” The closest living relatives of pronghorn, though, are the giraffe and the okapi, an animal often referred to as the “forest giraffe” found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Of note, the pronghorn is the fastest land mammal in the Americas, capable or reaching speeds of up to 55 miles per hour (88 km/h).
When I first spotted these pronghorns, they were coming down the side of a hill and preparing to cross the road on which I was traveling. There were two young pronghorns and one an adult, that I presumed was their mother. I focused primarily on the young ones, as you can see in the first two photos, and finally got a shot of the adult as the the pronghorns were climbing a hill on the other side of the road. If I remember correctly, I took the first two photos through the windshield of my car.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
I remember seeing pronghorns during a drive west when I was in college. I also loved them as a horse-crazy child. Thanks for sharing these images! Nina