Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
Speaker 1: wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
Speaker 1: conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're focusing
Speaker 1: in on the Star of September, the object of desire
Speaker 1: for most hunters in North America, and the mammal with
Speaker 1: arguably the most recognizable mating call out there. We're talking
Speaker 1: about Elk, but not so much where they are right now.
Speaker 1: That's too easy. We're talking about where they've been. I
Speaker 1: remember the whole thing vividly. Every step that Elk made
Speaker 1: come in my direction, filling the tension increase on my
Speaker 1: bowstring as I tried to perfectly time my draw so
Speaker 1: that he wouldn't see me, the bugle that he sounded
Speaker 1: when he was just twenty two steps away. I can
Speaker 1: replay all of it. It's like it lives on some
Speaker 1: sort of greatest Memories highlights that just stays inside my brain.
Speaker 1: Any hunter will tell you that while all hunts are
Speaker 1: special in their own right, there's just some that stick
Speaker 1: out more than others. In May of twenty seventeen, I
Speaker 1: was told I was gonna get my first chance at
Speaker 1: an archery bull elk, and I promise you I'm not
Speaker 1: indulging the story when I say that I'm surprised I
Speaker 1: didn't have to restring my bow because I practiced so much.
Speaker 1: From that day forward up until the first week of September,
Speaker 1: when I hit the interstate and headed west. Every morning
Speaker 1: and every evening I was shooting. I was practicing at
Speaker 1: further distances than before. I was shooting more arrows per
Speaker 1: session than I normally did. I would even go as
Speaker 1: far as running laps to get my heart rate up
Speaker 1: so I could really get some practice shooting while my
Speaker 1: heart was pumping. I was doing everything that I could
Speaker 1: think of to get ready. I remember that first morning, myself, Will, Jordan,
Speaker 1: and Troy hiking up the mountain the star at the hunt.
Speaker 1: At dawn, the first sound of a piercing bugle hit
Speaker 1: my ears and it fell on me like some sort
Speaker 1: of dark cloud. It was a nerves butterflies in your
Speaker 1: stomach type of feeling or downright anxiety that I had
Speaker 1: never felt around a hunt before. Could I really do this?
Speaker 1: Could I make the shot when it counted? Could I
Speaker 1: hold it together when there was a one thousand pound
Speaker 1: animal standing bow range from me when the biggest thing
Speaker 1: I had ever hunted prior to was a white tail.
Speaker 1: Could I do it? I mean, really, could I actually
Speaker 1: do it? I didn't know. Days one, two, and three
Speaker 1: of the hunt went by without me getting an answer
Speaker 1: to that question. There was plenty of hiking, plenty of
Speaker 1: hearing elk, seeing elk, and one really close call that
Speaker 1: didn't quite pan out, And I remember the entire time
Speaker 1: I was at a war inside my own mind, telling
Speaker 1: myself constantly to quit worrying, that I had done the
Speaker 1: work necessary to be ready for this and I needed
Speaker 1: to enjoy it. But still the nerves persisted, and I'm
Speaker 1: most sure that as much as I tried to hide it,
Speaker 1: the nerves that I was dealing with was becoming fairly
Speaker 1: evident to the group. I still remember Will saying to
Speaker 1: me several times, stay calm, wait for the right shot,
Speaker 1: and when it presents itself, slam Duncan you can do it?
Speaker 1: I know you can. The morning of day four, we
Speaker 1: glassed a small herd early about twenty to thirty head
Speaker 1: of elk, mostly cows, with one big herd bull and
Speaker 1: five to six satellites. We stayed with them, and we
Speaker 1: watched them head up the northwest side of a mountain,
Speaker 1: presumably to bed down. With the west northwest winds that
Speaker 1: we had that day, we hatched the plans to circle
Speaker 1: around the east side of the mountain and close in
Speaker 1: slowly where we thought they would be betted. It took
Speaker 1: us about an hour and twenty minutes of crawling through
Speaker 1: live rocks and dense timber before getting to our intended spot.
Speaker 1: The moment it truly started to get real is when
Speaker 1: we crested a small rise and the wind that was
Speaker 1: blowing in our face brought along with it the strong
Speaker 1: scent of elk and rut. To my fellow elk hunters
Speaker 1: out there that have smelled this before, you know exactly
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. Will quickly signaled for myself and
Speaker 1: Jordan to creep forward as far as we thought we
Speaker 1: could get and find a good setup. We slipped about
Speaker 1: sixty more yards ahead before a deafening bugle let us
Speaker 1: know that for one we were in the right spot
Speaker 1: and two in no need of getting any closer. Will
Speaker 1: dropped back about seventy five yards and began to call,
Speaker 1: and chaos ensued almost immediately several bulls began bugling back,
Speaker 1: cows began to mew. We heard twigs snapping, and through
Speaker 1: the thick timber and shadows, we started to pick up movement.
Speaker 1: The elk were responding so rapidly it's as if they
Speaker 1: were wondering how these other elk that they were now
Speaker 1: hearing managed to get so close to them without them knowing.
Speaker 1: In a matter of minutes, I caught a confirmed glimpse
Speaker 1: of antlers coming our way. As the seconds went on,
Speaker 1: the glimpses became more frequent, until I finally got a
Speaker 1: good look a young satellite bull walking in our direction.
Speaker 1: And to be fully clear here, neither the young nor
Speaker 1: the satellite attributes about this bull phazed me. I had
Speaker 1: full intentions on shooting him. I drew my bow, and
Speaker 1: although he closed in to ten yards, he stayed behind
Speaker 1: a blown down tree top the entire time no shock.
Speaker 1: After a few seconds of standing there at that close
Speaker 1: of distance, you could see the bulls start to piece
Speaker 1: together that something wasn't right. He threw his head back,
Speaker 1: wheeled around, and began trotting back towards his group, and
Speaker 1: my hopes began to melt. I remember thinking to myself.
Speaker 1: He's about to spook the entire herd running back into
Speaker 1: them like that. Thankfully, Will and all his experience saw
Speaker 1: this happening and bugled right as the young bull was
Speaker 1: running back, and immediately he was answered. This time it
Speaker 1: wasn't a satellite, it was the herd bull. Will timed
Speaker 1: his bugle so perfectly that he painted the picture that
Speaker 1: the young bull was being run off by a new
Speaker 1: bull down below. I saw him almost immediately, not glimpses,
Speaker 1: not bits and pieces. I saw him. It's almost like
Speaker 1: he wanted to be seen. He was fifty yards enclosing.
Speaker 1: I remember watching his head tilted back as he marched
Speaker 1: through the trees, the sun and shadows dancing off his
Speaker 1: antlers with every step. As he closed into thirty five
Speaker 1: yards on a steady march, his head went behind the
Speaker 1: trunk of a large tree. I drew my bow and anchored.
Speaker 1: Just a few more steps, that's all I needed, and
Speaker 1: he would be broadside at top pen range. I had
Speaker 1: a mouth call in and I was ready to stop him,
Speaker 1: but there was no need. He stopped on his own,
Speaker 1: perfectly broadside at twenty two yards and bugled. It was
Speaker 1: like it was meant to be got. I remember looking
Speaker 1: through my side at my pen saying to myself, there's
Speaker 1: your shot. Smoked. I smoked it.
Speaker 2: I smoked.
Speaker 1: In a blink, it was over. The next thing I
Speaker 1: saw was white fletchings burying themselves a double lung shot.
Speaker 1: I had done it. I couldn't believe it. I had
Speaker 1: actually done it. Will came up and hugged me. Jordan
Speaker 1: and Troy high fived me, and we followed the sixty
Speaker 1: yard blood trail and recovered my first archery bowl. In
Speaker 1: that moment, It's like all the nerves, butterflies, and anxiety
Speaker 1: that I had been dealing with was flipped around and
Speaker 1: compounded into the most surreal gratitude and satisfaction that I
Speaker 1: had ever experienced in my hunting life. Archery l hunting
Speaker 1: the ultimate as far as I was concerned, and it
Speaker 1: had fully lived up to the hype. And I just
Speaker 1: couldn't believe that I was standing there getting to experience
Speaker 1: it like this. I'm not lost for words unless I
Speaker 1: don't know what to say.
Speaker 3: Man, holy smokes.
Speaker 1: But now, as always, let's zoom out on all this.
Speaker 1: Why am I telling you this story in the first place?
Speaker 1: Why do I think it's important that you hear about
Speaker 1: my first archery elk. When you think of elk hunting,
Speaker 1: what do you think of? For me growing up, it
Speaker 1: meant Primos's truth about hunting elk videos, the mantra of
Speaker 1: go west, young man, because of course you had to
Speaker 1: go west to hunt elk, right. I mean? There are
Speaker 1: Western big game species, arguably the most iconic Western game species.
Speaker 1: Everyone knows that, But has it always been that way?
Speaker 1: You've probably heard of the Rocky Mountain elk. Heck, you're
Speaker 1: probably familiar with the Roosevelt elk, but have you ever
Speaker 1: heard of the Eastern elk? To sharpen all of us
Speaker 1: up on this subject, let's dive into some quick history,
Speaker 1: because while elk are, without a question of predominantly Western
Speaker 1: species today, I'm going to answer my own question in
Speaker 1: saying it's not always been that way. The following are
Speaker 1: excerpts regarding the presence of Eastern elk in different states
Speaker 1: throughout the country from a published paper titled Muri nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one. Elk of North America. In Arkansas, there is
Speaker 1: one record to the effect that in eighteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: herds of buffalo and elk still roamed in the northeastern
Speaker 1: region near the Missouri boundary east of the Black River,
Speaker 1: and it's reasonable to suppose that the elk originally had
Speaker 1: a wider distribution in the state, but available literature does
Speaker 1: not show it and lose Siana. A man named doctor
Speaker 1: Milton Dunn wrote a letter documenting elk in the state
Speaker 1: in eighteen twenty nine, and there's also a recorded killing
Speaker 1: of a bull elk with a gross weight of seven
Speaker 1: hundred and four pounds near Madison Parish on Walnut Bayou
Speaker 1: in December of eighteen forty two. In the early days
Speaker 1: of Illinois, elk reigns throughout the entire state, where the
Speaker 1: prairies were preeminently their home, but they disappeared relatively quickly.
Speaker 1: An explored named Micheau recorded one being killed by his
Speaker 1: guide in seventeen ninety five in Sack County, Iowa. All
Speaker 1: of the earliest settlers united in saying that elk were plentiful,
Speaker 1: they were found from solitary individuals up to five hundred
Speaker 1: and a herd, and they were known to be an
Speaker 1: important food source, and that elkhorns were recorded being picked
Speaker 1: up by the wagon load. In eighteen fifty six in Michigan.
Speaker 1: In the early parts of the nineteenth century, elk were
Speaker 1: common in parts of the Lower Peninsula. In Kentucky, elk
Speaker 1: were abundant and were used as food by travelers. We
Speaker 1: know this through famed stories like Dangle Boons encountering vast
Speaker 1: herds of elk and bison. We also know of other
Speaker 1: early explorers, such as John Strader, James Jaeger, and Colonel
Speaker 1: Thomas Walker that documented great numbers of elk in Kentucky
Speaker 1: as well. And this is just listing off a few
Speaker 1: of the states in the East where there's record of
Speaker 1: eastern elk. I think it's evident there's a bigger story here,
Speaker 1: one that goes mostly unknown. And although I feel like
Speaker 1: we've been here before, because this feels much like the
Speaker 1: bison episode, I'm led to ask what happened. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know about y'all, but personally, I think it'd
Speaker 1: be pretty sweet if I could call in a bugling
Speaker 1: bull in my home state of Mississippi. I mean, a
Speaker 1: guy can dream, right, But more importantly, let's get some answers.
Speaker 1: Jim Heffelfinger is no stranger to the Meat Eater Network.
Speaker 1: He's also a bona fide servant nut or at least
Speaker 1: that's what his Instagram handle would lead me to believe,
Speaker 1: as well as being the wildlife science coordinator for the
Speaker 1: Arizona Game and Fish Department. When I was scouring the
Speaker 1: earth for a source on eastern Elk, it became evident
Speaker 1: very quickly that Jim Heffelfinger was the man to talk to.
Speaker 1: Here's Jim.
Speaker 3: There's less known about some of these iconic species in
Speaker 3: the East because they disappeared so fast. The settlement started
Speaker 3: east to west like a slow burn across the continent,
Speaker 3: and you saw the disappearance of these animals that were
Speaker 3: we think are charismatic because they are, but the bottom
Speaker 3: lines is they were filled with meat and wrapped in leather,
Speaker 3: and the early early people, early Europeans that came to
Speaker 3: the continent needed.
Speaker 2: All that stuff. They were natural resources for them.
Speaker 3: So they disappeared pretty quickly in the East before scientists
Speaker 3: got cranked up and naturalists started describing things and writing
Speaker 3: things down. So that's why we know very little about
Speaker 3: some of these that disappeared early. The map that I
Speaker 3: sent you just showed that disappearance of elk really from
Speaker 3: the east to the west, and the original the original
Speaker 3: distribution of eastern elk. Strangely enough, it seemed like it
Speaker 3: didn't cover the entire continent. It seemed to not go
Speaker 3: out to the eastern seaboard all the way, which is unusual,
Speaker 3: and it doesn't go all the way down to the
Speaker 3: Gulf coast all the weather's probably the southern half of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama.
Speaker 3: There really isn't good records of elk in those historic times.
Speaker 3: If you go back to some of the fossil record
Speaker 3: a couple thousands of years ago, you'll find some elk there,
Speaker 3: but strangely enough, not at the time that people were
Speaker 3: starting to record things along the coast there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I noticed that. I mean, obviously, me being
Speaker 1: from Mississippi, I keyed end on that state. And while
Speaker 1: some of it is shaded the color for the eastern
Speaker 1: elk range, it says no record of elk.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, some of those southeastern states have no records
Speaker 3: of elk, and some of them have just a few
Speaker 3: in there, and so it doesn't seem like they came
Speaker 3: down into Florida, Like, no records in Florida. Down into
Speaker 3: Florida in historic times, there's a lot of old deer
Speaker 3: fossils in Florida from the place of scene, and that
Speaker 3: evolutionary history is an interesting one. But along the Gulf Coast,
Speaker 3: along the eastern seaboard, they seem to have been in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is interesting because I thought, you know, when
Speaker 1: I was doing, you know, a look into bison in
Speaker 1: the eastern United States, there's a record of bison all
Speaker 1: the way into northern Florida, so I would have thought
Speaker 1: there would have been some elk in there too, But
Speaker 1: there's no fossil record for it, at least.
Speaker 3: And that's all we can say too, is that that
Speaker 3: we don't have evidence of it doesn't mean they weren't there.
Speaker 3: Although a lot of these a lot of these fossil sites,
Speaker 3: we have a lot of fossils of all these other
Speaker 3: for example, grassland species, and so when you get one
Speaker 3: that's missing, that's that it's a little stronger evidence that
Speaker 3: maybe it wasn't there. We would we would be picking
Speaker 3: up some fragments in there. But elk in the east
Speaker 3: certainly coexisted in some of those open grasslands and certainly
Speaker 3: in the central Great Plains with bison. And we're largely
Speaker 3: a grassland and mountain species early on, and people people
Speaker 3: sometimes say, well, the early elkward grassland species and then
Speaker 3: they shifted to a mountain species.
Speaker 2: But I think they were.
Speaker 3: Just at such broad ecological adaptability that they were in
Speaker 3: the mountains and they were in the grassland. And then
Speaker 3: when we took over basically the grasslands with our domestic
Speaker 3: grazers and our development and over exploitation before we had
Speaker 3: the conservation system we have now, they disappeared from those open,
Speaker 3: vulnerable areas. And then they existed in some of the
Speaker 3: areas with more security cover. And some of that was
Speaker 3: the west and the Rocky Mountains. Some of it you'll see,
Speaker 3: like one of the latest Eastern elk that was ever killed,
Speaker 3: I think was in Pennsylvania, and so there was other
Speaker 3: big blocks of forest that also provided that kind of
Speaker 3: security cover that allowed those Eastern elk to hold out
Speaker 3: the longest in some of those areas.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're getting a whole lot of good information here,
Speaker 1: a better understanding of where these Eastern elk were, a
Speaker 1: better understanding of when they started to quote disappear. The
Speaker 1: fact that they didn't quite reach the eastern coastline, or
Speaker 1: the fact that we don't have much or any record
Speaker 1: of them in several Southeastern states like Mississippi or Alabama,
Speaker 1: some of the habitats the eastern elk inhabited. But before
Speaker 1: we get ahead of ourselves, I feel like there's a
Speaker 1: very important question that we need to answer early. What
Speaker 1: exactly is an eastern elk? Is it a subspecies? Is
Speaker 1: it different than a rocky mountain elk? Is there any
Speaker 1: difference at all.
Speaker 3: That's a good question because many people they start talking
Speaker 3: about eastern elk as if they were a well defined
Speaker 3: scientific thing, like a subspecies, Like you could go somewhere
Speaker 3: in a book and find the physical characteristics of an
Speaker 3: eastern elk and how it differed from other elk or
Speaker 3: even more recently genetic differences. But the fact is, one
Speaker 3: hundred years ago people took a box of crayolas and
Speaker 3: started drawing color polygons on a big map and started
Speaker 3: labeling these Eastern elk, rocky mountain elk, manitoban elk, and
Speaker 3: coloring them differently, and then even describing them in scientific
Speaker 3: papers one hundred years ago saying this one's darker, this
Speaker 3: one's a little smaller, And in reality they had one
Speaker 3: individual or two individual skins and skulls and museum. They
Speaker 3: took a few measurements and they said, you know, this
Speaker 3: is bigger, this is smaller. And that's what's happened with
Speaker 3: most of our elk subspecies, and most of the subspecies
Speaker 3: of a lot of things. They're thirty eight white tailed
Speaker 3: deer subspecies in North and South America. Those certainly are
Speaker 3: not valid subspecies. And so what we had was we
Speaker 3: had if you go back a little further in the
Speaker 3: Pliss scene, towards the end of the place the scene,
Speaker 3: there was not the last glacial maximum, which was Wisconsin,
Speaker 3: but before that was called the Illinois Glacial Maximum, and
Speaker 3: that glacier, that glacial period, that ice age, drew up
Speaker 3: and froze up a lot of the seawater and opened
Speaker 3: up the Bearing Strait that people talk about a lot.
Speaker 3: So we had elk coming over for the first time
Speaker 3: in North America in the late Pliso scene, probably a
Speaker 3: little more than one hundred thousand years ago, and that
Speaker 3: was the first time we had elk in North America.
Speaker 3: And then that Illinois Glacial period went away and melted
Speaker 3: and we got into what they called the Sangamoni and Interglacial,
Speaker 3: which is the interglacial between the Illinois and the latest
Speaker 3: Wisconsin one. That interglacial period where it warmed up, freed
Speaker 3: up the central part of the continent and allowed those
Speaker 3: elk to flow the rest of the way in. And incidentally,
Speaker 3: that's when the first primitive bison bison prisseus, came with
Speaker 3: elk at the same time and poured into what became
Speaker 3: the grasslands in North America. And that primitive elk then
Speaker 3: turned into bison latifrons, the big longhort, long horned bison.
Speaker 3: Then that turned into bison, bison, the recent bison. So
Speaker 3: elk and bison have that evolutionary kind of North American
Speaker 3: invasion history at the same time and occupied a lot
Speaker 3: of those same areas in North America. So those elk
Speaker 3: came in, they filled North America. They came almost to
Speaker 3: the eastern seaboard, like we were talking about, and they
Speaker 3: really weren't different. They just came in as one elk
Speaker 3: and occupied that whole continent. And so when we talk
Speaker 3: about eastern elk, and then we talk about the center
Speaker 3: part of the continent, they call Manitoban elk, which is
Speaker 3: the Great Plains, and then the Rocky Mountain elk which
Speaker 3: are in the Rocky Mountains.
Speaker 2: Those really probably were not any different.
Speaker 3: And when people have looked genetically at a few Eastern
Speaker 3: elk specimens, and whenever they look at Manitoban versus Rocky Mountain,
Speaker 3: they don't find any difference. So most of the elk
Speaker 3: in North America were really just elk, and we shouldn't
Speaker 3: get hung up on these subspecies. Now, modern genetics shows
Speaker 3: a difference between the roosevelts which are in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 3: and the Tuleialk, which are smaller antlers are a little
Speaker 3: different in central California. There's some genetic differences there, but
Speaker 3: those genetic differences are probably from the last couple hundred
Speaker 3: years of just their ranges retracting into isolated pockets and
Speaker 3: then evolving a little bit differently in small populations like
Speaker 3: the tule elk. Almost when extinct, there was just a
Speaker 3: handful of tule elk in California, and then they've come back,
Speaker 3: and so there's a real genetic bottleneck there, and any
Speaker 3: genetic differences may stem just from that genetic bottlenecking, But
Speaker 3: I wouldn't we certainly shouldn't get hung up about Eastern
Speaker 3: versus manitobin versus Rocky Mountain elk. They're really mostly our
Speaker 3: labels that we've just put.
Speaker 1: On them, So Rocky Mountain elk, manitoban elk, Eastern elk
Speaker 1: mostly just labels that we made up for the most part.
Speaker 1: To quote Jim directly, elk or just elk, which leads
Speaker 1: me to more questions. Because we see variances in body size,
Speaker 1: we see variances in antler size. If elk or just elk,
Speaker 1: would that mean that what we're seeing is more of
Speaker 1: a response to living in different habitats and climates rather
Speaker 1: than it being new to speciation right.
Speaker 3: Right, those are referred to just as ecotypes. So there
Speaker 3: are in certain areas animals that live in a forest
Speaker 3: versus grassland are going to start looking differently as they
Speaker 3: adapt to those local environments. So if you look at
Speaker 3: the eastern elk was first described by a naturis the
Speaker 3: first described for science, not the first time someone mentioned
Speaker 3: in elk, but first described for science in seventeen seventy seven,
Speaker 3: and that was described based on a painting that someone did,
Speaker 3: John James Audubon, who the Audubon Society was namesake. So
Speaker 3: John James Audubon painted a painting of elk, and the
Speaker 3: elk used were in eastern United States, so they were
Speaker 3: eastern elk that he painted.
Speaker 1: All right, this is both a very important and highly
Speaker 1: fascinating piece of this story, So lean in you all ready.
Speaker 1: In seventeen seventy seven, an early naturalist by the name
Speaker 1: of Exer Lebine was the first person to describe elk
Speaker 1: for scientific purposes. Seventy years later, John James Ottobon does
Speaker 1: a painting of eastern elk, and then in nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: a man named Vernon Bailey uses Oudobon's painting to scientifically
Speaker 1: describe this subspecies known as the eastern elk. To contextualize
Speaker 1: that a bit, imagine that you're told that you have
Speaker 1: to go and paint the next whitetail buck that you
Speaker 1: get on your trail camera, and then a scientist is
Speaker 1: going to be using your artistic expression to sign typically
Speaker 1: describe animals. I don't know about y'all, but the natural
Speaker 1: resource in science world is mighty lucky they didn't get
Speaker 1: stuck with me doing paintings for references in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: That'd been some bad descriptions. I'm just saying basing a
Speaker 1: scientific description off of someone's painting as wild.
Speaker 3: You know, so when you think about someone describing as
Speaker 3: subspecies and describing what color it is and basing it
Speaker 3: on whatever color brown John James Audubon dipped his paintbrush into,
Speaker 3: that's not really what we call science and good subspecies.
Speaker 3: And in fact, they saw that that original painting was
Speaker 3: in a book called Quadrupeds of North America John James Audubon,
Speaker 3: until out of curiosity I had, of course, I had
Speaker 3: to go see this painting that John James Audubon did
Speaker 3: of Eastern Elk.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, honestly, it is a pretty good
Speaker 1: painting as far.
Speaker 3: As yeah, not to take anything away from John's painting
Speaker 3: for sure.
Speaker 1: As far as scientific accuracy though you could see like
Speaker 1: there's so much room for flaw though, as far as like,
Speaker 1: here's how we're going to biologically describe this species is
Speaker 1: based off this dude's artistic interpretation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right.
Speaker 3: And people have gone back and they looked at museum specimens,
Speaker 3: they've measured a few skulls here and there, and they've
Speaker 3: looked at skins, and so you'll see things in the
Speaker 3: literature about this one's browner this one's redder, this one's bigger,
Speaker 3: and they're not done with large sample sizes like we
Speaker 3: know today you really have to do to capture any
Speaker 3: kind of regional or subspecific variation in an animal.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we all have a better understanding of the
Speaker 1: Eastern elk, their distribution, which was fairly vast, as far
Speaker 1: south as Louisiana, as far north as Minnesota, and as
Speaker 1: far east as New York. Wild right, we understand that
Speaker 1: though they had their own name, that from what we
Speaker 1: can understand, they weren't that much different, if any, from
Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountain elk today. But now it's time to
Speaker 1: get down to the more important part of this story.
Speaker 1: What happened to them? Where did they go? We need answers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it definitely it was over exploitation, just like white
Speaker 3: tail deer. You think you would never be able to
Speaker 3: wipe white tail deer out of large areas, but we
Speaker 3: certainly did. When people are on the landscape and they
Speaker 3: needed meat and they needed leather, they just took from
Speaker 3: the local forests and once we had enough firearms in
Speaker 3: the woods, that exploitation was too great for them to
Speaker 3: keep up. And the same thing happened with elk. We
Speaker 3: just don't hear about it as much because the bison
Speaker 3: killing in the open plains was much more of a concerted,
Speaker 3: focused effort in a shorter period of time, whereas the
Speaker 3: disappearance of elk was just an exploitation rate that was
Speaker 3: higher than the reproductive rate over a long period of time.
Speaker 3: Kind of coming from the east to the west, wasn't
Speaker 3: such a focused acute bison killing. You didn't have people
Speaker 3: that we called elk hunters like our bison hunters out there,
Speaker 3: and so it happened slower, and it happened on a
Speaker 3: more local landscape throughout that whole eastern United States.
Speaker 2: But there's no doubt it was exploitation.
Speaker 3: And once we started introducing some laws in late seventeen
Speaker 3: hundreds early eighteen hundreds to protect the wildlife that were there,
Speaker 3: most of the elk were gone in all of those
Speaker 3: areas by then.
Speaker 2: By eighteen eighties or so.
Speaker 1: According to historical accounts, when European settlers moved in, elk
Speaker 1: didn't hide, but rather continued to roam where they always had,
Speaker 1: Similarly to how many records reflect bison behaved towards the
Speaker 1: early arrival of settlers foraging near settlements during the winter
Speaker 1: months is one particular example of how they made themselves
Speaker 1: out to be an easy target, and from the meet
Speaker 1: and hide that they offered a very enticing target. And
Speaker 1: to be fair, if you're an early European settler that
Speaker 1: needs meet and hide for necessities, it's hard to toss blame. However,
Speaker 1: there are some res records of the killing of elk
Speaker 1: happening in grave excess, in quotes from men like Ernest
Speaker 1: Thomas Setton, who said, there are a few stories of
Speaker 1: bloodlust more disgusting than that detailing the slaughter of the
Speaker 1: great elk bands. And look, I'm not here to villainize anyone.
Speaker 1: That's not what this show's about, and it rarely ever
Speaker 1: yields a positive result. Is there enough historical record to
Speaker 1: show some of the Eastern elk killings happened purely based
Speaker 1: off sustenance? Yes. Is there enough historical record to show
Speaker 1: that some of the Eastern elk killings were blatantly over exploitive. Yes,
Speaker 1: But regardless of what the intentions were, it does not
Speaker 1: change the result. It's a deeply complex issue. I'm fascinated
Speaker 1: by the relationship that humans have with their wildlife and
Speaker 1: While it's clear that we are pretty much fully to
Speaker 1: blame for the extra pation of Eastern Elk, we are
Speaker 1: also to be accredited for the restoration efforts moving forward.
Speaker 1: It's easy to look at our track record sometimes and
Speaker 1: focus solely on the negatives, But where would that even
Speaker 1: get us. Much of the wildlife and wildlife habitat destruction
Speaker 1: happen in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and
Speaker 1: people then don't have the gift of hindsight that we
Speaker 1: have now. So I think it's more important to look
Speaker 1: at what we have done since and what we can
Speaker 1: do going forward. Theodore Roosevelt a man who's known for
Speaker 1: many things, one of the most notable being the most
Speaker 1: conservation minded president that this country has ever seen. During
Speaker 1: his presidency, Old Teddy Roosevelt protected approximately two hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty million acres of public land. What does this have
Speaker 1: to do with the Eastern Elk, you ask, Well, let's
Speaker 1: find out.
Speaker 3: Once we started protecting them, and then eventually, and it
Speaker 3: wouldn't take too long before restoration efforts started. Nineteen thirteen
Speaker 3: was a big year. A lot of states translocated elk,
Speaker 3: mostly from Yellowstone National Park in nineteen thirteen, and so
Speaker 3: that started. That was the year Arizona started, the year
Speaker 3: New Mexico started, I think the year Pennsylvania started. So
Speaker 3: we started not long after their disappearance on the road
Speaker 3: to restoration of a lot of wildlife. It took a
Speaker 3: little bit longer for alcol course, but a lot of
Speaker 3: states started elk restoration in the nineteen teens nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: They just weren't successful then, and in more recent times
Speaker 3: in the last several decades had been much more successful
Speaker 3: in areas.
Speaker 1: Nineteen thirteen is when many elk restoration efforts began to
Speaker 1: take place. And did you happen to catch where most
Speaker 1: of these elk being used for restoration efforts were coming
Speaker 1: from Yellowstone National Park? It makes you wonder how this
Speaker 1: could have played out differently had Teddy not established this
Speaker 1: place and others to be protected. Our actions have consequences,
Speaker 1: and man, I am sure thankful for the positive consequences.
Speaker 1: When the restoration projects first started around nineteen thirteen, was
Speaker 1: that spearheaded mainly from like sportsman type groups like you know,
Speaker 1: trying to restore resource that they were aware that they
Speaker 1: had wiped out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it always was the you know, the some of
Speaker 3: the just the local people that didn't have that connection
Speaker 3: with nature, that connection with these game species, or a
Speaker 3: vested interest in having these game species healthy. They were
Speaker 3: silent at the time. They just were lamenting the loss
Speaker 3: of these wildlife and all of these bad people that
Speaker 3: killed them. And it was really the people who had
Speaker 3: this vested interest in these species and really liked these
Speaker 3: species and realized that they were gone or going to
Speaker 3: be gone. They're the ones that jumped up and started
Speaker 3: getting money and started funding and finding and organizing restoration activities.
Speaker 1: What about those early restoration efforts, was there anything about
Speaker 1: them specifically that made them overall not successful?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was normally like just a few individuals they
Speaker 3: would crate up a handful of elk and go release
Speaker 3: them somewhere. And at the time nineteen sixteen, nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties, we didn't have game wardens all over the place,
Speaker 3: We didn't have the law enforcement then to protect those animals.
Speaker 3: There's even a few stories where a small nucleus of
Speaker 3: elks started growing and rowing, and then there was just
Speaker 3: rampant poaching that kind of cranked up and actually made
Speaker 3: them disappear, made them grub them out or knock them
Speaker 3: way down. So lack of law enforcement and just a
Speaker 3: handful of animals being brought one time in release, which
Speaker 3: we know now is not the recipe for successful restoration.
Speaker 3: The people restoring elk at the time were pretty amazing.
Speaker 3: When you look at the old photographs, they're they're piling,
Speaker 3: they're capturing them in a big corral, like in the
Speaker 3: winter in Yellowstone. The north end of Yellowstone. Gardener Montana
Speaker 3: was a lot was a place where a lot of
Speaker 3: elk were captured in Yellowstone and then shipped out of Gardener,
Speaker 3: Montana and they just they just piled them into train cars.
Speaker 3: The train just came to whatever state that was stopped somewhere.
Speaker 3: They built some little wooden bridges and they bring the
Speaker 3: elk down into like big wagons. In Arizona, there's big
Speaker 3: wagons that they used lumber to build a cage around
Speaker 3: the wagon. They shoved the elk in there, and then
Speaker 3: and then they would take those wagons out to the
Speaker 3: release site and release the elk. And you look at
Speaker 3: the just the ingenuity and the engineering and just what
Speaker 3: those people did to bring elk back into their native abbatats.
Speaker 3: And we'll go and fly over with netguns and helicopters
Speaker 3: and you know, capture fifteen to day and put them
Speaker 3: in a air conditioned trailer and take them across the country.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we know now why some of the early
Speaker 1: restoration efforts failed. There was a lot of trial and error,
Speaker 1: a lot of learning, and some need for law enforcement.
Speaker 1: But we also know of some areas, particularly in the
Speaker 1: eastern US, that have experienced successful elk restoration. So how
Speaker 1: did that happen. There's been some successful restoration in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: there's been successful successful restoration to you know, to scale
Speaker 1: in Arkansas, in Kentucky. What's going on there? What allowed
Speaker 1: it to be successful this time around?
Speaker 3: Yeah, certainly it was probably overarching recipe for success is
Speaker 3: to just have the population, just have people having more
Speaker 3: of a conservation ethic and wanting to restore native species
Speaker 3: and being interested in that. And we've also in addition
Speaker 3: to just having general support everybody loves to see animals,
Speaker 3: native animals being restored like that, but not only having
Speaker 3: that conservation ethic, but having this large force of law
Speaker 3: enforcement to make sure that laws to allow them to
Speaker 3: not be killed and not be exploited. Now we can
Speaker 3: protect those and then we know more about genetics. A
Speaker 3: lot of times now we'll bring animals from three different
Speaker 3: places where make sure we don't get one big family
Speaker 3: group and release them as the nucleus for a restoration project,
Speaker 3: which they may have done in the past with some animals,
Speaker 3: but so we'll bring in genetic diversity, we'll release them,
Speaker 3: We'll bring in multiple waves of animals to help that
Speaker 3: be successful. We'll protect them, and we've got just a
Speaker 3: lot of support from the public, which kind of relates
Speaker 3: to a lot of money and funding coming in to
Speaker 3: help fund all that.
Speaker 1: Today, we obviously don't have the elk populations in the
Speaker 1: eastern part of the country that we once had, but
Speaker 1: we have seen notable success. There's states like Pennsylvania and
Speaker 1: Kentucky and others that have restored elk populations high enough
Speaker 1: that there's even a regulated hunting season. And there's other
Speaker 1: states like Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia
Speaker 1: and others that all have growing elk numbers. It really
Speaker 1: is a conservation success worth noting and celebrating. But before
Speaker 1: we move forward with any more restoration talk, there's one
Speaker 1: factor that it would feel disingenuous to not mention. One
Speaker 1: other thing that Steve brought up the last time him
Speaker 1: and I were on a podcast that he was talking
Speaker 1: about how one of the casualties of caused by CDWD
Speaker 1: is some some ELK restoration efforts just because there's so
Speaker 1: much controversy and worry around supporting live service right now.
Speaker 1: How big of an issue do you think that is
Speaker 1: going forward with alcaster restoration.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's not.
Speaker 3: Much restoration going on in the West, and I haven't
Speaker 3: been plugged into the eastern ELK restoration, so I don't
Speaker 3: know of particular instances where CWD is shut down a
Speaker 3: translocation or they haven't proposed it because of that. I
Speaker 3: know in general, you don't right now. You don't want
Speaker 3: to put servids on the train or in the trailer
Speaker 3: and move them across the country without knowing a lot
Speaker 3: about CWD, and it's just the easiest way to spread CWD.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't need any help right now.
Speaker 3: So transporting service is not a good thing right now,
Speaker 3: and so agencies are are certainly justified in being careful
Speaker 3: not to do that.
Speaker 1: CWD never fun to talk about, but unfortunately worth mentioning.
Speaker 1: While on the topic, of present day restoration efforts. Let's
Speaker 1: round this conversation off by hearing Jim's opinion on the
Speaker 1: future of elk in the East. What do you think
Speaker 1: the future of elk restoration is in the East, because
Speaker 1: it's it's I wouldn't say that it's like and this
Speaker 1: is this is just from my point of view. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say that it's a widely known thing. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say that it's like a like a hit this huge
Speaker 1: inflection point out it's upward trending. But I would say that,
Speaker 1: like if from the time that I was in my
Speaker 1: teens until now, folks seem to be more aware of
Speaker 1: elk in Pennsylvania, elk in Kentucky and Arkansas, Like what
Speaker 1: do you what do we think the future is for
Speaker 1: for elk being restored in the East?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think people are more aware of it because
Speaker 3: it's been such a success. It's been there's so many
Speaker 3: states now that have growing elk populations. I think you
Speaker 3: mentioned it's not an inflection, and that's a good point.
Speaker 3: It's not like a lot of wildlife species we introduce.
Speaker 3: Some they did grow a little bit and then they
Speaker 3: kind of hid an inflection point and they just take cough.
Speaker 3: If you think about like a hockey stick trape graph,
Speaker 3: where they just hit this point where they take off
Speaker 3: and they're super abundant. We're not going to see that
Speaker 3: with eastern elk because the eastern half of the United
Speaker 3: States is just so dominated with such a heavy human footprint.
Speaker 3: They're not going to explode and have elk all over
Speaker 3: the place. But I think there's a lot of room
Speaker 3: for growth. There's a lot of places central Wisconsin, for example,
Speaker 3: that elk population can grow a lot. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of places where we can have elk and we can
Speaker 3: grow existing population.
Speaker 2: So I think it.
Speaker 3: I think the future is optimistic to have more elk,
Speaker 3: but it's always going to be in these populations and
Speaker 3: states here and there. It's not going to be back
Speaker 3: to the whole eastern United States again.
Speaker 1: I just my mind goes It's like I wonder if
Speaker 1: there will there will if it's realistic to think that
Speaker 1: there will be a day where somebody thinks about elk
Speaker 1: hunting and they don't just drift their mind to the West.
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 3: I think for a lot of people, and especially in
Speaker 3: those states recovering them, I think I kind of did
Speaker 3: nine states that have elk hunts now, and I think
Speaker 3: I counted ten states that have elk population, and that's
Speaker 3: an awful lot of it, very limited, very restricted, but
Speaker 3: that's an awful lot of states that have sportsmen and
Speaker 3: women in those states thinking about elk in their own state.
Speaker 1: I just wonder all the time, you know, what it
Speaker 1: would be like to you know, there's not any elk
Speaker 1: in Mississippi right now, but I'm like, man, how crazy
Speaker 1: would it be if in September early fall you could
Speaker 1: walk out somewhere in Mississippi and here in elk bugle.
Speaker 1: That would just be just be insane.
Speaker 2: That would be yeah, I think. I mean.
Speaker 3: Elk are just another of a long line of examples
Speaker 3: of sportsmen and women people that are interested and have
Speaker 3: been restoring native species doing so, restoring some of these
Speaker 3: native animals that otherwise wouldn't be restored. Bankers and lawyers
Speaker 3: aren't going to get together in fund a restoration of
Speaker 3: some of these species. But when they're restored like that,
Speaker 3: everybody benefits. It's what we call a user pay everyone
Speaker 3: benefits model, where sportsmen and women that are contributing that
Speaker 3: money into conservation. It's the not the only money that
Speaker 3: goes into conservation, but it's a large chunk of what
Speaker 3: makes these kind of things happen. And when those populations
Speaker 3: are restored. Everybody that goes camping and here's an elk
Speaker 3: bugle in their home state, everyone that goes hiking and
Speaker 3: sees a herd of out they're all benefiting from this restoration.
Speaker 3: And that's not a new story. It's one hundred year
Speaker 3: old story of restoration.
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot to be learned from the
Speaker 1: story of elk in the Eastern United States, a lot
Speaker 1: to be learned from our mistakes, a lot to be
Speaker 1: learned from what sportsmen and women can do in the
Speaker 1: name of wildlife conservation, and a lot to look forward
Speaker 1: to in the future. I would encourage all of you
Speaker 1: to check out the l courage closest to where you live,
Speaker 1: dive into its history as well as what's going on
Speaker 1: with it currently. I can almost promise you there's a
Speaker 1: cool story to be found there. I want to thank
Speaker 1: all of you for listening to back Woods University as
Speaker 1: well as Bear Grease in This Country Life. If you
Speaker 1: liked this episode, share it with a friend this week,
Speaker 1: or if you want to have some fun, share it
Speaker 1: with the worst elk caller that you have in your
Speaker 1: contact list, and stick around because if this podcast was
Speaker 1: an elk hunt, we've managed to cover some ground, but
Speaker 1: he just bugled and he's still one ridge over. There's
Speaker 1: a whole lot more on the way.