From a bluff overlooking a sunbaked valley outside Farmington, New Mexico, Aaron Facka and Michael Dax watched a black helicopter soar, thrumming loudly as it swooped low over the landscape. Inside, three men searched the grasslands for the white specks of pronghorn, the antelope-like creatures that inhabit the Western plains of North America.
It was early March, cloudless and warm, but Facka and Dax, who both work for the Wildlands Network, an environmental nonprofit, were nervous. The men in the helicopter worked for a company that specializes in capturing wildlife for biological research. Each time they spotted a pronghorn, the pilot flew close enough for a colleague to fire a gun that released a net, trapping the animal so that it could be fitted with a GPS collar. The collars provide data about herd movements, habitat use and population numbers, but the stress of trapping puts pronghorn at risk of death from overexertion or “capture myopathy.”
“There’s an unknown mortality factor with the captures, and it’s obviously not something we want,” Facka said.
The operation marked the beginning of a new study by the Wildlands Network that will evaluate how pronghorn and other wildlife respond to utility-scale solar energy projects and discuss ways to mitigate their impact. Solar development is surging across the Four Corners region and the wider West. A recent study found that up to a third of potential development could overlap with wildlife migration corridors. Facka, senior wildlife biologist for the Western region at the Wildlands Network and the study’s architect, hopes the data will help pronghorn survive the energy transition.
In the valley below, workers were installing thousands of solar panels for the 1,100-acre San Juan Solar and Storage Project, located just a few miles from the shuttered San Juan Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant. New Mexico’s 2019 Energy Transition Act set a goal of 50% renewable energy generation by 2030, and this area’s plentiful sun, dry climate and existing transmission lines make it ideal for solar development. In every direction Dax pointed, there were proposals for more utility-scale solar. Yet there’s almost no data about how large mammals would be impacted by it.
FACKA GREW UP IN Kirtland, New Mexico, a small town just west of Farmington in the heart of the Four Corners. After years working elsewhere as a wildlife biologist, he returned home to work for the Wildlands Network. Growing up, he was always drawn to pronghorn, which, according to Dax, “look a bit like aliens,” with the males sporting black chin straps and distinctive namesake horns. Pronghorn can run up to 60 miles per hour, making them the second-fastest land animal on earth, and they are famous for having the longest land migration in the continental United States.
“There’s an unknown mortality factor with the captures, and it’s obviously not something we want.”
Of particular concern to Facka was how little scientists know about the Four Corners’ pronghorn population and range size. The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has not prioritized pronghorn research here, in part because the area is not a hunting destination. Jurisdictional limits are also a problem; the area is a mix of state and federal parcels and tribal land, and both the Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe lack the resources to conduct large-scale studies.
Dax was sure of one thing: Pronghorn numbers are declining across New Mexico, thanks in part to climate-change related drought. One study indicated that nine of the 18 pronghorn populations studied in the Southwest would be extinct or close to extinction by 2050. There were other threats, too: Pronghorn have trouble jumping over fences and other barriers, making it hard for them to cope as their habitat shrinks.
Soon after Facka started working for the Wildlands Network in 2021, the San Juan Generating Station shut down. As plans for large-scale solar development emerged, Facka saw an opportunity to help developers protect local wildlife from the resulting environmental stress.
“We can’t make the same mistakes over and over again with our policies,” he said. “I just felt like we were doing that by saying, ‘We’ll figure it out later; all that matters is we get green energy.’”
BELOW THE BLUFF where Dax and Facka stood, a glimmering sea of black panels stretched across the valley. The San Juan Solar Project occupies a big chunk of the highest-quality local pronghorn habitat, Dax said. He noted a cluster of trees lining an arroyo running through the middle of the solar field, where the pronghorn once rested in the shade.
Though the project was only about two-thirds complete, Dax expressed shock at its size, as well as the extent of the solar development planned for the surrounding area, which is already pockmarked by numerous oil and gas wells. “A lot of activity has been thrown at this place,” he mused.
The Four Corners region is a patchwork of federal, state and tribal lands. Since the many projects fall under different jurisdictions, regulators don’t have a way to account for their cumulative impacts. (The San Juan project, for example, is on private land). Nor are there standardized methods for considering wildlife needs in planning projects or mitigating the environmental impacts.
“We can’t make the same mistakes over and over again with our policies. I just felt like we were doing that by saying, ‘We’ll figure it out later; all that matters is we get green energy.’”
Currently, only one other study has examined solar energy’s impact on pronghorn. It found that pronghorn in southwestern Wyoming could no longer migrate through familiar areas following construction.
“We’re in this sprint phase” of solar development, Dax said. “And yet we’re still just trying to get a sense of how best to do this.”
Thanks to a $1.7 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Technologies Office, Dax and Facka have designed a study that they hope will provide some answers. Each collared pronghorn will transmit a GPS waypoint every hour for the next two-and-a-half years, showing how and where the animals are moving and whether the development is affecting their movement patterns and overall health.
That information will prove especially critical 100 miles south, on the Navajo Nation in eastern Arizona, where, the following day, the team would collar an additional 30 pronghorn in a second study area. Utility-scale solar development has been slow on tribal land, but in the past decade, the nation has received an influx of project applications.
Robust pronghorn herds were once an important part of Navajo ceremonies and the subsistence hunting lifestyle. Jessica Fort is the sole wildlife biologist who studies big game for the entire Navajo Nation, which encompasses 18 million acres — the size of West Virginia. Fort began tracking a few herds with GPS in the New Lands Chapter of the Navajo Nation in February of this year. Prior to this, the only data she’d been able to obtain came from annual aerial surveys, which gave her little more than a rough idea of the animals’ baseline numbers.
“What do we tell the solar company to do to mitigate impacts on animals?” Fort said. “We don’t really know, because we don’t know how their operations affect the animals’ movements.”
Fort hopes that this study will help future solar developments reduce their negative effects on pronghorn and other big game, perhaps by preserving movement corridors between projects and limiting development in certain areas.
Nearby, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe faces similar challenges, said Farley Ketchum, one of the tribe’s two wildlife biologists and an enrolled tribal member. A proposed solar farm on the 575,000-acre reservation, planned by the international renewable energy company Canigou Group, is slated to begin construction later this year, bringing over 500 local jobs. “This thing is going to be huge,” said Ketchum. But he worries that it will reduce pronghorn habitat and increase competition for scarce water resources. “I run my cattle down there and don’t see very many pronghorn,” he said.
JUST BEFORE NOON, Facka got a text from a scientist on his team. “Guys, we have a mortality.”
Facka hurried to his truck, while Dax and I remained on the bluff. The death was a reminder of the pronghorn’s vulnerability. By 2050, the U.S. may produce as much as 45% of its electricity using solar energy, possibly transforming more than 15,000 square miles into large-scale solar energy production facilities. Dax emphasized that he and Facka were not opposed to that shift.
“We want to make sure it’s data-driven and done in a way that we’re not simply trading climate impacts for habitat impact,” he said.
On our way back to my car, Dax and I scanned the side of the road for pronghorn. So far, I had only seen one, a white speck barely visible against the distant brown hillside. Then, on the dirt road running through the middle of the San Juan Solar project, we spotted three, walking casually through the grass. Behind them, sunbeams flashed on the black panels.
“There’s this idea that renewable energy is the answer,” Dax said. “And it can be the answer, but it’s still energy development, it’s still development on the landscape. Whether it’s residential development, oil and gas, renewable energy, we need to be making sure that for most of these things, there’s research to say, ‘OK, this is how we do it best.’”
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the June 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline ��Pronghorn among the panels.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
