By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
If you think you might have heard an elk bugle around Grayson Lake, or elsewhere in Carter County, you might not have been wrong. While we don’t have an established population in the area, young elk have traveled from the areas where populations were reestablished in southeastern Kentucky to places as far north as Grayson.
The proof? A young bull elk was struck and killed along I-64, just outside of the city, just a couple of weekends back.
It’s a rarity, explained Dr. John Hast – a wildlife biologist and program coordinator of Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife’s bear and elk programs – but these long distance treks happen from time to time.
“We don’t have many of our elk move out of the zone,” Hast noted. “We’ve got a 16 county elk zone… (and) the closest county (to Carter) would probably be Floyd and Martin County.”
However, he noted that “parts of Johnson County” also “have good herds of elk in them.”
But, he continued, “we just don’t see them moving much out of that country.”
He said they are mostly content where they are, with abundant food sources and habitat. So, unlike out west where they tend to be more migratory as they follow seasonal food sources, in the east they tend to stay in their home territory.
“With that said,” Hast acknowledged, “we have had a few move out over the years. I think, most notably, we had one that hung out in Madison County for two years and was seen grazing with beef cattle and just kind of moving around doing its thing. But it’s a very rare occurrence.”
“The factors that cause them to migrate out west just don’t exist here, in terms of going to the high country (to feed) and then getting run out by snow in the fall. We just don’t have those extremes.”
If it had been an older elk, it might indicate an established population. But the fact that it was an obviously young bull, he said, fits the patterns of young animals setting out to find their own territory.
“A young bull, he’s looking to make his spot, and summer is the time that they tend to make their movements.”
There are other differences between these reintroduced elk and their western forebears too, Hast explained. For instance, herd sizes are much smaller here than they are in the west, in part because they have less pressure from predators.
“Early on when we brought them in, they were living in groups of a hundred or more. You might see 300 at once somewhere. It’s not really necessary here. In the environment that we’ve got over here, we’re seeing them more living in family groups of four or five. During the rut, a bull may have a handful of cows with him, where, out west, they might have 40 or 50 to a big mature bull, and that’s just a product of the landscape. From an evolutionary standpoint, there is no advantage to being in a massive group in the east. We don’t have wolves. We generally don’t have any predators of adult elk. So, they’re not in that situation where they’re in a big group, and either the old elk or the sick elk gets taken out and the rest of the herd lives. That’s just not a factor here. So, they’re living more like we see whitetails in the east, in smaller family groups. It’s less of an advantage to be in a big group here. They’re slowly figuring that out, and adapting to it.”
He said another advantage here was the weather, which doesn’t have the same extremes the elk see in the Rocky Mountains. He said it’s intriguing to see the changes in behavior related to environment, even with animals that are genetically identical to their western cousins. But, he added, we can’t be completely sure if these elk are acting in the same way that the extinct eastern elk subspecies did.
“We don’t really have a good idea of what the extinct eastern elk did,” Hast explained. “It’s likely in Kentucky we probably had eastern elk, the eastern subspecies, in the Appalachian Mountains, and we probably had Rocky Mountain elk in the glades and prairies in western Kentucky. So, we very well could have been right on that line that separated the two.”
“There is a John James Audubon painting from the 1800s, and they pretty well looked like Rocky Mountain elk, and they were taken down in Henderson County and into the west,” he continued. “So, unfortunately, the eastern elk, the only thing that really exists from it is the skin (of one) that was killed in Pennsylvania.”
But, he said, his guess is that they “could have been a little bit smaller,” and “they probably acted more like white-tailed deer, because they were living in a forest environment.”
While those old growth forests were different than the younger forests that dominate eastern Kentucky today, Hast said he still thinks the environment is “probably the greatest driving factor on their behavior.”
“Just the fact that it’s a closed area,” he continued. “It’s not a wide open prairie where you can see. So, the elk’s bugle is essentially a long distance tool for communicating. That, of course, still works in the forest. But, as far as we know, eastern elk may have used it differently or not at all.”
But while the elk behavior has been shaped by the environment, he said, the impact they’ve had on the environment has actually been very minimal. The only measurable impact has been on the reestablishment of oaks in some areas. The animals’ browsing has slowed that recovery. But, he said, it’s a minimal impact.
“They tend to browse on young oaks and other trees that we want in a forested area,” he said. But, he continued, “it really hasn’t slowed anything down.”
For the most part, he said, the impact on the environment wasn’t much different from the impact of white-tailed deer.
That said, they are much larger than whitetail – so they eat more, and if you do hit one with a vehicle they could cause a lot more damage.
“A reproductive age cow is anywhere between 350 and 500 pounds,” Hast said. “We’ve caught some 600 pound, just big, cow elk. I’ve seen some bull elk come in that were 650 to 700 pounds field dressed. So, you’re probably looking at a big mature bull (weighing) 850 to 900 pounds.”
That’s compared to 150 to 175 pounds for a large whitetail.
“So, you’re looking at almost four times (the size).”
As for those reported elk bugles from around Grayson Lake?
“It certainly could be,” Hast said. “I don’t think we’ve got any resident elk up in that area at all. But, it wouldn’t be strange to have one come through there at times over the last 20 years. So, it potentially could be an elk bugle.”
Either way, the movement of the young elk seems to indicate the reintroduction program has been a success. From those initial releases of just over 1500 during the first four years of the program two decades ago, Hast said, the Kentucky herd has grown to an estimated population of 10,000. And while some of them may wander, and unfortunately be hit by vehicles, most have stayed where they were placed.
“It was an idea to put them on reclaimed strip mining area, grassland habitats. There was somewhat of a misunderstanding that they had to have grass, and we’re really not seeing that. They like it. They use it. It’s important for certain factors. But they’ll do just as well in forests. We’ve got herds that never leave a closed canopy for us. They rely on browse. They rely on smaller grass openings. Then, of course, the acorn crop in the fall. But either way, what boosted our elk population was just the number of acres of fresh mine reclamation that was in great forage, great grass, and forage definitely boosted it. Without a doubt. They had a buffet. They didn’t need to really move anywhere.”
“The good thing with that early reintroduction,” he continued, “and putting them on these mine areas, they generally stayed where they put them back then, and continue to. Those release sites are still the focal areas of our elk curve today.”
