Customer Reviews

Pronghorn: Ecology and Management

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This is an exhaustive book on pronghorn. Literally everything that you might want to know about pronghorns is here. And then some. For example, the chapter on hunting not only tells you how to clean a pronghorn but provides a few recipes (tastes like veal). The two lead authors are at the end of their careers and have collected two lifetimes of learning in this book.

Reflecting all that knowledge, many of the chapters read like laundry lists of the scholarly literature. That makes it an essential reference but many chapters are a pretty dry read.

The authors haven't done enough sifting through the material, weighing its strengths and weaknesses. We never get a manifesto for future research on, say, the parasitology or anatomy of the pronghorn. This would help liven up the book.

This lack of synthesis or manifesto probably reflects the fact that O'Gara and/or Yoakum are the author or co-author of almost every chapter. Knowledgeable as they are, they can't be the leading experts on every single aspect of the pronghorn. The book would have been better served by a greater range of contributors. An excellent model of this, and a comparably exhaustive book that covers its animal better, is Mech and Boitano's "Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation."

The authors display their own voice most strongly in those chapters on in management issues: fencing and habitat fragmentation, capture and relocation, and hunting. The authors have strong views on how to do these things and how to do them right. These chapters are also the most lively written and the easiest to read.

Even on those policy issues, O'Gara and Yoakum take the perspective of managers working within existing legal and political frameworks. From this bottom-up perspective, their best suggestions often rest on maintaining good relations among stakeholders such as hunters, landowners, and the public. It would be particularly valuable if these authors could step "outside the box" at the end and think about how they might change that regulatory environment in an ideal world. Do interspersed holdings of private land and BLM leases serve ranchers, hunters, and the animals best? Or would land swaps that consolidate private land and convert BLM land to wildlife refuges serve better? (Presumably the answer to that question depends on the share of public land in a state, since Wyoming and Nevada are not Nebraska or California.)

These authors prefer to avoid bolder steps and claims. Again, this differs dramatically from the community of wolf researchers. Essential as this book is as a desk reference for those interested in this animal, it could have been better.