Elk | Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

Elk in the Valley

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Leslie

This is the week the collared elk get their ‘check-ups’–sonogram, blood, and other indicators. In order to do that, these elk need to be located and darted from a helicopter. Then the biologists are lowered down, do their thing within just a few minutes, and are whisked away again to their next elk, while the elk is waking up. This is the last year of a five year study to find out why the elks’ pregnancy rates are so low in my valley.

Helicopter getting ready

I’ve been watching them on and off as they work the valley. The copter pilots are amazing. They’re Kiwis, the best mountain copter pilots around. With no doors, they dress in super warm suits, land in odd and uneven terrain, and maneuver quite close to trees, cliffs and mountain tops.

Watching them work, I couldn’t help but remember when I went river rafting on the South Island of New Zealand. The rafting adventure began at the head of a glacier and in order to get there we needed to ferry all our equipment, including ourselves, by helicopter up the canyon. I boarded the copter, fully expecting to fly above the canyon and set down on the glacier. But instead, the pilot took off inside the narrow canyon, running those curves like a race car with the raft waving around tied below us. The copter seemed to swing freely side to side, hanging by the propeller above. It was so scary that I decided to just accept whatever might come and enjoy the fantastic ride.

Copter in my valley

One of the students explained that the biologists on board are from Oregon and pioneered these elk allocation studies. Most of these elk are not residents. In other words, they don’t live here year round. Instead, they come in around January from the Park, snow pushing them towards warmer terrain. Sometime around late April or May, they begin to make their way back into Yellowstone to have their calves. From what the student heading the study tells me, 6 out of every 10 calves succumb to predators, mostly grizzlies coming out of hibernation with an appetite and the calves are easy prey in their first 10 days.

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But this study is looking at low pregnancy rates amongst this group.

I spent some time talking with one of the Game & Fish biologists about what’s being called sudden Aspen death in Colorado. Reminds me of Sudden Oak Death (SOD) in California which I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about. My own theory with SOD has to do with lack of fires. Fires have been cleansing the soils in California (and the West) for thousands of years, clearing out fungus as well as competing undergrowth.

This biologist had worked in south WY and felt that the Aspens, bereft of fires, are in the process of a natural rejuvenative cycle so young clones can arise. He told me a story about early settlers being angry at Native Americans in the Sierra Madres for setting fire to aged forests. Those Indians gardened the landscape with fire as their tool, aiding the regenerative process in Aspens. With a fire suppression policy blanketing the West for over 100 years, forest health has declined as well as quality of feed for our native ungulates.

Filed under: Elk | Tagged: Elk, Fire, Native grasses, Yellowstone National Park | Leave a comment »

The Elk and the Artemisia

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Leslie

I’ve been watching the elk for weeks around here. Not like the college kids doing the study though. They get up and out the door at dawn (when its frigid outside), locate the collared elks they need to watch that day, set up their tripods and scopes. and observe each elk for 15 minutes. They carry a digital voice recorder and make verbal notes–now they’re eating, now they’re sitting, now they’re chewing, etc. They’ve really gotten to know their elks. They call them by number, tell me if they’re too up country that day to observe, or that some have already gone back towards Yellowstone.

The study, as far as I understand it, is to try and determine what’s causing the low birth rates in the Sunlight elk herd–whether it be dietary, predators, or other factors. The interns in my valley are the ‘back country’ team. They told me they’ve even seen the elk gnawing on antlers and bones.

I have been wondering about their diet for a while. The sagebrush on the flats are browsed to crew-cut height. crew-cut Big Sagebrush

Not browsed Artemisia Apparently Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) is an important food in the winter. The guys think they eat the Sage when the snow cover is high because the Artemisias are taller. As the new grasses emerge, they migrate elevationally, eating the new growth. The sage, though, provides protein that the grasses don’t.

I was curious about the deer and the elk and how much their diets overlap. I see them grazing together a lot. Elk with deer In biology there’s a fancy term called ‘resource partitioning’, which basically means that the deer and elk just couldn’t be competing for the same foods in the same area or there wouldn’t be enough food. Yet I watch the deer nibble the sage and eat new grasses as well. But according to studies, grasses comprise 75% of an elks’ diet, whereas only about 25% of a mule deers. The guys were telling me that the elk get first choice from their observations.

Last year they did an aerial count and came up with around 1400 elk overwintering in the valley. A forest service ranger told me that was carrying capacity.

Almost every hike I take I scare elk out of the trees at some point. The funny thing is that I can be over 500 yards away, and they still scatter. My neighbor says they weren’t always that skittish. He says before the wolves you could approach them fairly closely. The deer here still can be trained to eat out of your hand.

But since I’ve lived here, the elk are sensitive to any slight movements. Last week I saw a herd high up on a rocky slope. They watched me for a brief few moments, decided I was a threat, then took off. Minutes later I came to a prominence that looked out over a treeless meadow. From all sides came elk, over 150. They gathered into a large herd and began moving like a flock of birds, turning and swaying this way and that, splitting up then coming back together. Elk beginning to gather