Pronghorn antelope on the prairie
— — the fastest thing the prairie holds.
Not only on a wall.
“Wyoming holds roughly half of North America's pronghorn, somewhere around four hundred thousand head on the sage flats and grassland between the Powder River basin and the Green River valley. They are the fastest land mammal in the western hemisphere, clocked at fifty-five miles an hour, and the long-distance migrators among them follow the Path of the Pronghorn, a 150-mile corridor from the upper Green River north to Grand Teton. On a still morning a herd lifts as one and the white rump patches flare like signals across the sage. from the studio
Pronghorn antelope on the prairie, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) are endemic to North America and the only surviving member of the Antilocapridae family. Wyoming carries the largest state population in the United States, estimated by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at roughly 400,000 to 500,000 head, distributed across the sagebrush steppe and shortgrass prairie that covers most of the state outside the high mountains. The densest concentrations sit in the Red Desert, the Bighorn Basin, and the upper Green River valley around Pinedale and Boulder.
Pronghorn are built for speed in open country. They can sustain about 55 miles per hour over short distances, the fastest verified speed of any New World land mammal, and hold 30 to 40 miles per hour for several miles. Their oversized windpipes, hearts, and lungs allow oxygen intake far above the mammal average for their body size. They evolved alongside the American cheetah, an extinct Pleistocene predator, and their top end is generally read as the inheritance of that ancient pressure. Eyesight is comparable to a human looking through eight-power binoculars.
One Sublette County herd migrates the Path of the Pronghorn, a corridor formally designated by the US Forest Service in 2008, the first federally protected wildlife migration route in the country. The animals winter on the upper Green River near Pinedale and summer in Grand Teton National Park, a round trip of roughly 150 miles each way. Spring migration starts in April; the herd is generally on summer range by late May. Rut runs through September and into early October, and bucks gather harems of does on the open sage.