Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

Why am I showing you all this very-far-away image of a pronghorn doe in the middle of a vast, open, empty stretch of land in Spring Creek Basin – and again, from a very great distance?

Because it’s not empty.

There’s mama pronghorn, of course. I saw her as I arrived at my usual spot from which I scan as much of the basin as I can for mustangs and other interesting things.

What you *can’t* see is her baby, curled tightly up into the edge of one of the sagebrush or saltbushes you see dotting the landscape. *I* can’t see it, even zoomed in, and then I forgot exactly which one it curled up against. Nature’s camouflage, indeed!

🙂

I saw it only briefly, through the binoculars, when she was with it, and it folded those impossibly long legs, dropped and went into hiding right before my glued-to-the-glass eyeballs – and then I forgot which bush it was near as I watched mama start to walk away, clearly worried about the choice between staying with her baby and my presence on a not-far-enough-away-for-comfort hill.

*Note: Mama pronghorns, like deer and elk – and domestic bovines – tuck their very-new babies into hiding, and the babies’ inborn instinct is to stay there, scentless, until mama returns. Mustangs do NOT perform this behavior, keeping their babies with them always, and the entire band provides protection to any outside threat.

While scanning the basin for mustangs, I then noticed a group of five pronghorns much closer below me. I’d walked away a little distance to look at them without my camera (never leave your camera behind), so what follows are some cellphone pix after they noticed me and made a big circle away and then up and around me to where they were basically above mama prongs. (I think I use my cell phone these days for more than actually making calls; how crazy!)

Three of the five; see them? Sort of center, light dots. Across the bottom/foreground is the berm of the road, and in the FAR back distance (near the very top of the pic, a bit to the right of center), those white dots are mustangs.

The other two of the five, following the first three. What a great view of Spring Creek Basin, eh? Spring Creek arroyo is the dark line in the semi-middle of the pic, on its way to Spring Creek canyon, where all the water gathered in Spring Creek Basin runs across part of Disappointment Valley to join Disappointment Creek, which eventually joins the Dolores River on its way to the Colorado River.

A top-down view of the aforementioned Spring Creek canyon – that’s the south-facing north wall of the canyon, spread-eagled like a, well, eagle’s wings. 🙂 See the pronghorns? All five are in this pic. You bet I was kicking myself for having walked away from my camera, but I didn’t expect them to give me such a great view! In the first two pix, I was looking down to the eastish and northeastish; now I’m looking fairly northish.

Now I’m looking westish/southwestish up the hill “behind” me (from the direction I was facing when I first saw them downhill from me). From that vantage point, they stopped, and I was able to regain my big gun (I never left the immediate area where I’d stopped to glass the basin), and they graciously waited while I snapped off some pix. They could see the mama below – and she could see them – from this point. The road is down below them to the left.

Note that the doe immediately in front of the buck looks suspiciously round in the belly. 🙂 Soon-to-be more new life!

When they all went out of sight down the hill, I decided that they didn’t need any continuing paparazzi, and I didn’t need to visit farther into the basin that day, and I headed back out. Good luck, little prongs; I hope to see you running soon like the fastest land mammal in North America that you were born to be!