ARIZONA ANTELOPE FOUNDATION
Conservation Organization of the Year 2005

21st Biennial Pronghorn Workshop
Special Recognition Honoree
Alice Koch, California Fish & Game

Alice’s daily job with Cal Fish & Game is as a wildlife biologist dealing with the management of pronghorn herds in California.  Often working in the Carrizo Plain of southern California with one of the few remaining herds there, Alice is known as “missy pronghorn”.

For over a decade, Alice has been completing vegetation transects to determine habitat condition and forage availability, assessing the hundreds of miles of rangeland fences and helping remedy the poor fence structure with modification projects, checking on fawning success in the spring, dealing with emergency feeding during droughts, doing habitat enhancement projects, coordinating with highway folks for installing roadside alert signs when highway corridors green up and attract pronghorn, doing lectures during public field tours, working with youth and conservation groups to modify fences or do other enhancement activities, writing up technical and popular publications, and working on other management activities associated with pronghorn.

Three important things about Alice should be noted: 1) often Alice is out modifying fences by herself, 2) Alice developed a drought feeding and water program to help the herds survive the drought year of 2002 and the result was no known loss of animals, and 3) Alice instigated a management strategy of minimizing roadside mortality during the drought by personally obtaining and installing road information signs alerting pronghorn of nearby feeding pronghorn.  This last effort is being used by other management agencies to remind motorists of high-speed accidents.

Back