Raising Hope for Peninsular Pronghorn

Peninsular pronghorn are the world’s second-fastest land mammals after cheetahs, able to run at speeds up to 60 mph. But they are also critically endangered, with fewer than 500 left in their Baja California, Mexico habitat. Over the past 100 years, the population of this antelope subspecies has dropped by 80 percent. Reasons include a loss of habitat, building of fences and roads that limit their movement, lack of water, removal of native vegetation in their habitat, and illegal hunting. At one point, scientists believed only 170 peninsular pronghorn were left on Earth.

These very small, young pronghorn are extremely vulnerable to predators, such as coyotes and crows. Wildlife care specialists from San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and other zoological institutions have joined with wildlife care experts from Mexico to help hand raise the fawns—bottle-feeding them several times a day, weighing them, assessing their overall health, protecting them from potential predators, and making sure they grow up healthy.