This is a single source award for the Arizona Game and Fish Department to design and construct a research paddock adjacent to the Sonoran pronghorn captive breeding pen within the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

The new paddock includes perimeter fence walls, perimeter electric fencing,

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internal partitions and a capture boma, an internal irrigation system to irrigate native vegetation and at least one water source.

This paddock is needed to evaluate the efficacy of experimental pronghorn release scenarios for pronghorn captured within the pen.

Each year, we will have a group of pronghorn that need to be removed from the pen to avoid complications associated with overcrowding and potential inbreeding.

We need the ability to remove targeted pronghorn from the captive breeding pen and temporarily contain them until they fully recover from the capture operation or until suitable conditions exist for releasing them into the wild.

The results gained from these experimental releases will help refine our long term release protocol for Sonoran pronghorn.

The existing pen was built at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in the fall of 2003 in an effort to increase the population size in the U. S. and Mexico as well as providing breeding stock for the establishment of additional populations within the U. S. Since December, 2006 , the Service in cooperation with the Department, National Park service, Bureau of Land Management, U. S. Air Force, U. S. Army, U. S. Marine Corps, LA Zoo and Phoenix Zoo have been actively engaged in planning and releasing pronghorn into the wild from the captive breeding pen.

We need to periodically release the pronghorn from the captive breeding pen into the wild to meet goals and objectives identified in the 1998 Sonoran Pronghorn Recovery Plan.