Helmut Karl "Hal" Buechner

During his graduate student days, in 1947, Helmut Buechner did multi-season field studies of the pronghorn on the Marfa Flats, during their slow recovery from near extirpation in the early 1900s. He documented their feeding patterns and showed their limited competition with cattle, while pointing out how the pronghorn’s diets did compete with sheep forage, and how pronghorn were blocked from escaping predators by netwire sheep fencing. Buechner’s ecological and management insights underlie modern public/private partnerships for pronghorn reintroductions and recovery. Buechner is also noted for his landmark 1960 monograph on bighorn sheep, showing their wide pre-Western settlement range and their drastic decline through 1960 due to overhunting, habitat loss, and disease spread from domestic sheep. In his later years, he went on to do valuable wildlife research at Washington State (1948-65), the Smithsonian Institution (1969-72), and the National Zoo (1972-75).