September 15, 2025 • 38 mins
It's September and everyone's mind is on bugling bull elk. Today they are recognized as one of the most sought after western big game species, but have you ever wondered if it has always been that way? In this episode, we dive into the fascinating history and mystery of the Eastern Elk. What were they, and what happened to them? We will cover everything from their first scientific description based off of a painting, to their hopeful future led by sportsmen and women.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support.
I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're focusing
in on the Star of September, the object of desire
for most hunters in North America, and the mammal with
(00:23):
arguably the most recognizable mating call out there. We're talking
about Elk, but not so much where they are right now.
That's too easy. We're talking about where they've been. I
(00:49):
remember the whole thing vividly. Every step that Elk made
come in my direction, filling the tension increase on my
bowstring as I tried to perfectly time my draw so
that he wouldn't see me, the bugle that he sounded
when he was just twenty two steps away. I can
replay all of it. It's like it lives on some
sort of greatest Memories highlights that just stays inside my brain.
(01:13):
Any hunter will tell you that while all hunts are
special in their own right, there's just some that stick
out more than others. In May of twenty seventeen, I
was told I was gonna get my first chance at
an archery bull elk, and I promise you I'm not
indulging the story when I say that I'm surprised I
didn't have to restring my bow because I practiced so much.
From that day forward up until the first week of September,
(01:33):
when I hit the interstate and headed west. Every morning
and every evening I was shooting. I was practicing at
further distances than before. I was shooting more arrows per
session than I normally did. I would even go as
far as running laps to get my heart rate up
so I could really get some practice shooting while my
heart was pumping. I was doing everything that I could
think of to get ready. I remember that first morning, myself, Will, Jordan,
(01:58):
and Troy hiking up the mountain the star at the hunt.
At dawn, the first sound of a piercing bugle hit
my ears and it fell on me like some sort
of dark cloud. It was a nerves butterflies in your
stomach type of feeling or downright anxiety that I had
never felt around a hunt before. Could I really do this?
Could I make the shot when it counted? Could I
hold it together when there was a one thousand pound
(02:19):
animal standing bow range from me when the biggest thing
I had ever hunted prior to was a white tail.
Could I do it? I mean, really, could I actually
do it? I didn't know. Days one, two, and three
of the hunt went by without me getting an answer
to that question. There was plenty of hiking, plenty of
hearing elk, seeing elk, and one really close call that
(02:40):
didn't quite pan out, And I remember the entire time
I was at a war inside my own mind, telling
myself constantly to quit worrying, that I had done the
work necessary to be ready for this and I needed
to enjoy it. But still the nerves persisted, and I'm
most sure that as much as I tried to hide it,
the nerves that I was dealing with was becoming fairly
evident to the group. I still remember Will saying to
(03:01):
me several times, stay calm, wait for the right shot,
and when it presents itself, slam Duncan you can do it?
I know you can. The morning of day four, we
glassed a small herd early about twenty to thirty head
of elk, mostly cows, with one big herd bull and
five to six satellites. We stayed with them, and we
(03:22):
watched them head up the northwest side of a mountain,
presumably to bed down. With the west northwest winds that
we had that day, we hatched the plans to circle
around the east side of the mountain and close in
slowly where we thought they would be betted. It took
us about an hour and twenty minutes of crawling through
live rocks and dense timber before getting to our intended spot.
The moment it truly started to get real is when
(03:43):
we crested a small rise and the wind that was
blowing in our face brought along with it the strong
scent of elk and rut. To my fellow elk hunters
out there that have smelled this before, you know exactly
what I'm talking about. Will quickly signaled for myself and
Jordan to creep forward as far as we thought we
could get and find a good setup. We slipped about
sixty more yards ahead before a deafening bugle let us
(04:05):
know that for one we were in the right spot
and two in no need of getting any closer. Will
dropped back about seventy five yards and began to call,
and chaos ensued almost immediately several bulls began bugling back,
cows began to mew. We heard twigs snapping, and through
the thick timber and shadows, we started to pick up movement.
(04:25):
The elk were responding so rapidly it's as if they
were wondering how these other elk that they were now
hearing managed to get so close to them without them knowing.
In a matter of minutes, I caught a confirmed glimpse
of antlers coming our way. As the seconds went on,
the glimpses became more frequent, until I finally got a
good look a young satellite bull walking in our direction.
(04:46):
And to be fully clear here, neither the young nor
the satellite attributes about this bull phazed me. I had
full intentions on shooting him. I drew my bow, and
although he closed in to ten yards, he stayed behind
a blown down tree top the entire time no shock.
After a few seconds of standing there at that close
of distance, you could see the bulls start to piece
(05:08):
together that something wasn't right. He threw his head back,
wheeled around, and began trotting back towards his group, and
my hopes began to melt. I remember thinking to myself.
He's about to spook the entire herd running back into
them like that. Thankfully, Will and all his experience saw
this happening and bugled right as the young bull was
running back, and immediately he was answered. This time it
(05:30):
wasn't a satellite, it was the herd bull. Will timed
his bugle so perfectly that he painted the picture that
the young bull was being run off by a new
bull down below. I saw him almost immediately, not glimpses,
not bits and pieces. I saw him. It's almost like
he wanted to be seen. He was fifty yards enclosing.
I remember watching his head tilted back as he marched
(05:52):
through the trees, the sun and shadows dancing off his
antlers with every step. As he closed into thirty five
yards on a steady march, his head went behind the
trunk of a large tree. I drew my bow and anchored.
Just a few more steps, that's all I needed, and
he would be broadside at top pen range. I had
a mouth call in and I was ready to stop him,
(06:14):
but there was no need. He stopped on his own,
perfectly broadside at twenty two yards and bugled. It was
like it was meant to be got. I remember looking
through my side at my pen saying to myself, there's
your shot. Smoked. I smoked it.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I smoked.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
In a blink, it was over. The next thing I
saw was white fletchings burying themselves a double lung shot.
I had done it. I couldn't believe it. I had
actually done it. Will came up and hugged me. Jordan
and Troy high fived me, and we followed the sixty
yard blood trail and recovered my first archery bowl. In
that moment, It's like all the nerves, butterflies, and anxiety
(06:57):
that I had been dealing with was flipped around and
compounded into the most surreal gratitude and satisfaction that I
had ever experienced in my hunting life. Archery l hunting
the ultimate as far as I was concerned, and it
had fully lived up to the hype. And I just
couldn't believe that I was standing there getting to experience
it like this. I'm not lost for words unless I
(07:22):
don't know what to say.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Man, holy smokes.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But now, as always, let's zoom out on all this.
Why am I telling you this story in the first place?
Why do I think it's important that you hear about
my first archery elk. When you think of elk hunting,
what do you think of? For me growing up, it
meant Primos's truth about hunting elk videos, the mantra of
go west, young man, because of course you had to
(07:53):
go west to hunt elk, right. I mean? There are
Western big game species, arguably the most iconic Western game species.
Everyone knows that, But has it always been that way?
You've probably heard of the Rocky Mountain elk. Heck, you're
probably familiar with the Roosevelt elk, but have you ever
heard of the Eastern elk? To sharpen all of us
up on this subject, let's dive into some quick history,
(08:15):
because while elk are, without a question of predominantly Western
species today, I'm going to answer my own question in
saying it's not always been that way. The following are
excerpts regarding the presence of Eastern elk in different states
throughout the country from a published paper titled Muri nineteen
(08:38):
fifty one. Elk of North America. In Arkansas, there is
one record to the effect that in eighteen thirty four,
herds of buffalo and elk still roamed in the northeastern
region near the Missouri boundary east of the Black River,
and it's reasonable to suppose that the elk originally had
a wider distribution in the state, but available literature does
(08:58):
not show it and lose Siana. A man named doctor
Milton Dunn wrote a letter documenting elk in the state
in eighteen twenty nine, and there's also a recorded killing
of a bull elk with a gross weight of seven
hundred and four pounds near Madison Parish on Walnut Bayou
in December of eighteen forty two. In the early days
of Illinois, elk reigns throughout the entire state, where the
(09:20):
prairies were preeminently their home, but they disappeared relatively quickly.
An explored named Micheau recorded one being killed by his
guide in seventeen ninety five in Sack County, Iowa. All
of the earliest settlers united in saying that elk were plentiful,
they were found from solitary individuals up to five hundred
and a herd, and they were known to be an
important food source, and that elkhorns were recorded being picked
(09:42):
up by the wagon load. In eighteen fifty six in Michigan.
In the early parts of the nineteenth century, elk were
common in parts of the Lower Peninsula. In Kentucky, elk
were abundant and were used as food by travelers. We
know this through famed stories like Dangle Boons encountering vast
herds of elk and bison. We also know of other
early explorers, such as John Strader, James Jaeger, and Colonel
(10:03):
Thomas Walker that documented great numbers of elk in Kentucky
as well. And this is just listing off a few
of the states in the East where there's record of
eastern elk. I think it's evident there's a bigger story here,
one that goes mostly unknown. And although I feel like
we've been here before, because this feels much like the
bison episode, I'm led to ask what happened. I mean,
(10:24):
I don't know about y'all, but personally, I think it'd
be pretty sweet if I could call in a bugling
bull in my home state of Mississippi. I mean, a
guy can dream, right, But more importantly, let's get some answers.
Jim Heffelfinger is no stranger to the Meat Eater Network.
He's also a bona fide servant nut or at least
that's what his Instagram handle would lead me to believe,
(10:44):
as well as being the wildlife science coordinator for the
Arizona Game and Fish Department. When I was scouring the
earth for a source on eastern Elk, it became evident
very quickly that Jim Heffelfinger was the man to talk to.
Here's Jim.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
There's less known about some of these iconic species in
the East because they disappeared so fast. The settlement started
east to west like a slow burn across the continent,
and you saw the disappearance of these animals that were
we think are charismatic because they are, but the bottom
lines is they were filled with meat and wrapped in leather,
and the early early people, early Europeans that came to
(11:22):
the continent needed.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
All that stuff. They were natural resources for them.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
So they disappeared pretty quickly in the East before scientists
got cranked up and naturalists started describing things and writing
things down. So that's why we know very little about
some of these that disappeared early. The map that I
sent you just showed that disappearance of elk really from
the east to the west, and the original the original
(11:47):
distribution of eastern elk. Strangely enough, it seemed like it
didn't cover the entire continent. It seemed to not go
out to the eastern seaboard all the way, which is unusual,
and it doesn't go all the way down to the
Gulf coast all the weather's probably the southern half of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama.
There really isn't good records of elk in those historic times.
(12:10):
If you go back to some of the fossil record
a couple thousands of years ago, you'll find some elk there,
but strangely enough, not at the time that people were
starting to record things along the coast there.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, because I noticed that. I mean, obviously, me being
from Mississippi, I keyed end on that state. And while
some of it is shaded the color for the eastern
elk range, it says no record of elk.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Right, Yeah, some of those southeastern states have no records
of elk, and some of them have just a few
in there, and so it doesn't seem like they came
down into Florida, Like, no records in Florida. Down into
Florida in historic times, there's a lot of old deer
fossils in Florida from the place of scene, and that
(12:53):
evolutionary history is an interesting one. But along the Gulf Coast,
along the eastern seaboard, they seem to have been in there.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, which is interesting because I thought, you know, when
I was doing, you know, a look into bison in
the eastern United States, there's a record of bison all
the way into northern Florida, so I would have thought
there would have been some elk in there too, But
there's no fossil record for it, at least.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
And that's all we can say too, is that that
we don't have evidence of it doesn't mean they weren't there.
Although a lot of these a lot of these fossil sites,
we have a lot of fossils of all these other
for example, grassland species, and so when you get one
that's missing, that's that it's a little stronger evidence that
maybe it wasn't there. We would we would be picking
(13:38):
up some fragments in there. But elk in the east
certainly coexisted in some of those open grasslands and certainly
in the central Great Plains with bison. And we're largely
a grassland and mountain species early on, and people people
sometimes say, well, the early elkward grassland species and then
they shifted to a mountain species.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
But I think they were.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Just at such broad ecological adaptability that they were in
the mountains and they were in the grassland. And then
when we took over basically the grasslands with our domestic
grazers and our development and over exploitation before we had
the conservation system we have now, they disappeared from those open,
vulnerable areas. And then they existed in some of the
(14:22):
areas with more security cover. And some of that was
the west and the Rocky Mountains. Some of it you'll see,
like one of the latest Eastern elk that was ever killed,
I think was in Pennsylvania, and so there was other
big blocks of forest that also provided that kind of
security cover that allowed those Eastern elk to hold out
the longest in some of those areas.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Okay, so we're getting a whole lot of good information here,
a better understanding of where these Eastern elk were, a
better understanding of when they started to quote disappear. The
fact that they didn't quite reach the eastern coastline, or
the fact that we don't have much or any record
of them in several Southeastern states like Mississippi or Alabama,
some of the habitats the eastern elk inhabited. But before
(15:04):
we get ahead of ourselves, I feel like there's a
very important question that we need to answer early. What
exactly is an eastern elk? Is it a subspecies? Is
it different than a rocky mountain elk? Is there any
difference at all.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
That's a good question because many people they start talking
about eastern elk as if they were a well defined
scientific thing, like a subspecies, Like you could go somewhere
in a book and find the physical characteristics of an
eastern elk and how it differed from other elk or
even more recently genetic differences. But the fact is, one
hundred years ago people took a box of crayolas and
(15:39):
started drawing color polygons on a big map and started
labeling these Eastern elk, rocky mountain elk, manitoban elk, and
coloring them differently, and then even describing them in scientific
papers one hundred years ago saying this one's darker, this
one's a little smaller, And in reality they had one
individual or two individual skins and skulls and museum. They
took a few measurements and they said, you know, this
(16:01):
is bigger, this is smaller. And that's what's happened with
most of our elk subspecies, and most of the subspecies
of a lot of things. They're thirty eight white tailed
deer subspecies in North and South America. Those certainly are
not valid subspecies. And so what we had was we
had if you go back a little further in the
Pliss scene, towards the end of the place the scene,
(16:21):
there was not the last glacial maximum, which was Wisconsin,
but before that was called the Illinois Glacial Maximum, and
that glacier, that glacial period, that ice age, drew up
and froze up a lot of the seawater and opened
up the Bearing Strait that people talk about a lot.
So we had elk coming over for the first time
in North America in the late Pliso scene, probably a
(16:44):
little more than one hundred thousand years ago, and that
was the first time we had elk in North America.
And then that Illinois Glacial period went away and melted
and we got into what they called the Sangamoni and Interglacial,
which is the interglacial between the Illinois and the latest
Wisconsin one. That interglacial period where it warmed up, freed
up the central part of the continent and allowed those
(17:06):
elk to flow the rest of the way in. And incidentally,
that's when the first primitive bison bison prisseus, came with
elk at the same time and poured into what became
the grasslands in North America. And that primitive elk then
turned into bison latifrons, the big longhort, long horned bison.
(17:27):
Then that turned into bison, bison, the recent bison. So
elk and bison have that evolutionary kind of North American
invasion history at the same time and occupied a lot
of those same areas in North America. So those elk
came in, they filled North America. They came almost to
the eastern seaboard, like we were talking about, and they
really weren't different. They just came in as one elk
(17:49):
and occupied that whole continent. And so when we talk
about eastern elk, and then we talk about the center
part of the continent, they call Manitoban elk, which is
the Great Plains, and then the Rocky Mountain elk which
are in the Rocky Mountains.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Those really probably were not any different.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
And when people have looked genetically at a few Eastern
elk specimens, and whenever they look at Manitoban versus Rocky Mountain,
they don't find any difference. So most of the elk
in North America were really just elk, and we shouldn't
get hung up on these subspecies. Now, modern genetics shows
a difference between the roosevelts which are in the Pacific Northwest,
and the Tuleialk, which are smaller antlers are a little
(18:27):
different in central California. There's some genetic differences there, but
those genetic differences are probably from the last couple hundred
years of just their ranges retracting into isolated pockets and
then evolving a little bit differently in small populations like
the tule elk. Almost when extinct, there was just a
handful of tule elk in California, and then they've come back,
(18:50):
and so there's a real genetic bottleneck there, and any
genetic differences may stem just from that genetic bottlenecking, But
I wouldn't we certainly shouldn't get hung up about Eastern
versus manitobin versus Rocky Mountain elk. They're really mostly our
labels that we've just put.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
On them, So Rocky Mountain elk, manitoban elk, Eastern elk
mostly just labels that we made up for the most part.
To quote Jim directly, elk or just elk, which leads
me to more questions. Because we see variances in body size,
we see variances in antler size. If elk or just elk,
would that mean that what we're seeing is more of
(19:27):
a response to living in different habitats and climates rather
than it being new to speciation right.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
Right, those are referred to just as ecotypes. So there
are in certain areas animals that live in a forest
versus grassland are going to start looking differently as they
adapt to those local environments. So if you look at
the eastern elk was first described by a naturis the
first described for science, not the first time someone mentioned
(19:54):
in elk, but first described for science in seventeen seventy seven,
and that was described based on a painting that someone did,
John James Audubon, who the Audubon Society was namesake. So
John James Audubon painted a painting of elk, and the
elk used were in eastern United States, so they were
(20:15):
eastern elk that he painted.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
All right, this is both a very important and highly
fascinating piece of this story, So lean in you all ready.
In seventeen seventy seven, an early naturalist by the name
of Exer Lebine was the first person to describe elk
for scientific purposes. Seventy years later, John James Ottobon does
a painting of eastern elk, and then in nineteen thirty five,
(20:39):
a man named Vernon Bailey uses Oudobon's painting to scientifically
describe this subspecies known as the eastern elk. To contextualize
that a bit, imagine that you're told that you have
to go and paint the next whitetail buck that you
get on your trail camera, and then a scientist is
going to be using your artistic expression to sign typically
(21:00):
describe animals. I don't know about y'all, but the natural
resource in science world is mighty lucky they didn't get
stuck with me doing paintings for references in the eighteen hundreds.
That'd been some bad descriptions. I'm just saying basing a
scientific description off of someone's painting as wild.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
You know, so when you think about someone describing as
subspecies and describing what color it is and basing it
on whatever color brown John James Audubon dipped his paintbrush into,
(21:40):
that's not really what we call science and good subspecies.
And in fact, they saw that that original painting was
in a book called Quadrupeds of North America John James Audubon,
until out of curiosity I had, of course, I had
to go see this painting that John James Audubon did
of Eastern Elk.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
I mean, I mean, honestly, it is a pretty good
painting as far.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
As yeah, not to take anything away from John's painting
for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
As far as scientific accuracy though you could see like
there's so much room for flaw though, as far as like,
here's how we're going to biologically describe this species is
based off this dude's artistic interpretation.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
And people have gone back and they looked at museum specimens,
they've measured a few skulls here and there, and they've
looked at skins, and so you'll see things in the
literature about this one's browner this one's redder, this one's bigger,
and they're not done with large sample sizes like we
know today you really have to do to capture any
kind of regional or subspecific variation in an animal.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Okay, so we all have a better understanding of the
Eastern elk, their distribution, which was fairly vast, as far
south as Louisiana, as far north as Minnesota, and as
far east as New York. Wild right, we understand that
though they had their own name, that from what we
can understand, they weren't that much different, if any, from
the Rocky Mountain elk today. But now it's time to
(23:03):
get down to the more important part of this story.
What happened to them? Where did they go? We need answers.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, it definitely it was over exploitation, just like white
tail deer. You think you would never be able to
wipe white tail deer out of large areas, but we
certainly did. When people are on the landscape and they
needed meat and they needed leather, they just took from
the local forests and once we had enough firearms in
the woods, that exploitation was too great for them to
(23:32):
keep up. And the same thing happened with elk. We
just don't hear about it as much because the bison
killing in the open plains was much more of a concerted,
focused effort in a shorter period of time, whereas the
disappearance of elk was just an exploitation rate that was
higher than the reproductive rate over a long period of time.
(23:52):
Kind of coming from the east to the west, wasn't
such a focused acute bison killing. You didn't have people
that we called elk hunters like our bison hunters out there,
and so it happened slower, and it happened on a
more local landscape throughout that whole eastern United States.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
But there's no doubt it was exploitation.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
And once we started introducing some laws in late seventeen
hundreds early eighteen hundreds to protect the wildlife that were there,
most of the elk were gone in all of those
areas by then.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
By eighteen eighties or so.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
According to historical accounts, when European settlers moved in, elk
didn't hide, but rather continued to roam where they always had,
Similarly to how many records reflect bison behaved towards the
early arrival of settlers foraging near settlements during the winter
months is one particular example of how they made themselves
out to be an easy target, and from the meet
(24:47):
and hide that they offered a very enticing target. And
to be fair, if you're an early European settler that
needs meet and hide for necessities, it's hard to toss blame. However,
there are some res records of the killing of elk
happening in grave excess, in quotes from men like Ernest
Thomas Setton, who said, there are a few stories of
bloodlust more disgusting than that detailing the slaughter of the
(25:11):
great elk bands. And look, I'm not here to villainize anyone.
That's not what this show's about, and it rarely ever
yields a positive result. Is there enough historical record to
show some of the Eastern elk killings happened purely based
off sustenance? Yes. Is there enough historical record to show
that some of the Eastern elk killings were blatantly over exploitive. Yes,
But regardless of what the intentions were, it does not
(25:33):
change the result. It's a deeply complex issue. I'm fascinated
by the relationship that humans have with their wildlife and
While it's clear that we are pretty much fully to
blame for the extra pation of Eastern Elk, we are
also to be accredited for the restoration efforts moving forward.
It's easy to look at our track record sometimes and
focus solely on the negatives, But where would that even
(25:55):
get us. Much of the wildlife and wildlife habitat destruction
happen in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and
people then don't have the gift of hindsight that we
have now. So I think it's more important to look
at what we have done since and what we can
do going forward. Theodore Roosevelt a man who's known for
many things, one of the most notable being the most
(26:16):
conservation minded president that this country has ever seen. During
his presidency, Old Teddy Roosevelt protected approximately two hundred and
thirty million acres of public land. What does this have
to do with the Eastern Elk, you ask, Well, let's
find out.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Once we started protecting them, and then eventually, and it
wouldn't take too long before restoration efforts started. Nineteen thirteen
was a big year. A lot of states translocated elk,
mostly from Yellowstone National Park in nineteen thirteen, and so
that started. That was the year Arizona started, the year
New Mexico started, I think the year Pennsylvania started. So
we started not long after their disappearance on the road
(26:55):
to restoration of a lot of wildlife. It took a
little bit longer for alcol course, but a lot of
states started elk restoration in the nineteen teens nineteen twenties.
They just weren't successful then, and in more recent times
in the last several decades had been much more successful
in areas.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Nineteen thirteen is when many elk restoration efforts began to
take place. And did you happen to catch where most
of these elk being used for restoration efforts were coming
from Yellowstone National Park? It makes you wonder how this
could have played out differently had Teddy not established this
place and others to be protected. Our actions have consequences,
and man, I am sure thankful for the positive consequences.
(27:36):
When the restoration projects first started around nineteen thirteen, was
that spearheaded mainly from like sportsman type groups like you know,
trying to restore resource that they were aware that they
had wiped out.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yeah, it always was the you know, the some of
the just the local people that didn't have that connection
with nature, that connection with these game species, or a
vested interest in having these game species healthy. They were
silent at the time. They just were lamenting the loss
of these wildlife and all of these bad people that
(28:12):
killed them. And it was really the people who had
this vested interest in these species and really liked these
species and realized that they were gone or going to
be gone. They're the ones that jumped up and started
getting money and started funding and finding and organizing restoration activities.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
What about those early restoration efforts, was there anything about
them specifically that made them overall not successful?
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Yeah, it was normally like just a few individuals they
would crate up a handful of elk and go release
them somewhere. And at the time nineteen sixteen, nineteen thirteen,
nineteen twenties, we didn't have game wardens all over the place,
We didn't have the law enforcement then to protect those animals.
There's even a few stories where a small nucleus of
(28:59):
elks started growing and rowing, and then there was just
rampant poaching that kind of cranked up and actually made
them disappear, made them grub them out or knock them
way down. So lack of law enforcement and just a
handful of animals being brought one time in release, which
we know now is not the recipe for successful restoration.
(29:19):
The people restoring elk at the time were pretty amazing.
When you look at the old photographs, they're they're piling,
they're capturing them in a big corral, like in the
winter in Yellowstone. The north end of Yellowstone. Gardener Montana
was a lot was a place where a lot of
elk were captured in Yellowstone and then shipped out of Gardener,
Montana and they just they just piled them into train cars.
(29:40):
The train just came to whatever state that was stopped somewhere.
They built some little wooden bridges and they bring the
elk down into like big wagons. In Arizona, there's big
wagons that they used lumber to build a cage around
the wagon. They shoved the elk in there, and then
and then they would take those wagons out to the
(30:01):
release site and release the elk. And you look at
the just the ingenuity and the engineering and just what
those people did to bring elk back into their native abbatats.
And we'll go and fly over with netguns and helicopters
and you know, capture fifteen to day and put them
in a air conditioned trailer and take them across the country.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Okay, so we know now why some of the early
restoration efforts failed. There was a lot of trial and error,
a lot of learning, and some need for law enforcement.
But we also know of some areas, particularly in the
eastern US, that have experienced successful elk restoration. So how
did that happen. There's been some successful restoration in Pennsylvania,
(30:48):
there's been successful successful restoration to you know, to scale
in Arkansas, in Kentucky. What's going on there? What allowed
it to be successful this time around?
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yeah, certainly it was probably overarching recipe for success is
to just have the population, just have people having more
of a conservation ethic and wanting to restore native species
and being interested in that. And we've also in addition
to just having general support everybody loves to see animals,
native animals being restored like that, but not only having
(31:23):
that conservation ethic, but having this large force of law
enforcement to make sure that laws to allow them to
not be killed and not be exploited. Now we can
protect those and then we know more about genetics. A
lot of times now we'll bring animals from three different
places where make sure we don't get one big family
group and release them as the nucleus for a restoration project,
(31:46):
which they may have done in the past with some animals,
but so we'll bring in genetic diversity, we'll release them,
We'll bring in multiple waves of animals to help that
be successful. We'll protect them, and we've got just a
lot of support from the public, which kind of relates
to a lot of money and funding coming in to
help fund all that.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Today, we obviously don't have the elk populations in the
eastern part of the country that we once had, but
we have seen notable success. There's states like Pennsylvania and
Kentucky and others that have restored elk populations high enough
that there's even a regulated hunting season. And there's other
states like Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia
and others that all have growing elk numbers. It really
(32:29):
is a conservation success worth noting and celebrating. But before
we move forward with any more restoration talk, there's one
factor that it would feel disingenuous to not mention. One
other thing that Steve brought up the last time him
and I were on a podcast that he was talking
about how one of the casualties of caused by CDWD
(32:53):
is some some ELK restoration efforts just because there's so
much controversy and worry around supporting live service right now.
How big of an issue do you think that is
going forward with alcaster restoration.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, there's not.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Much restoration going on in the West, and I haven't
been plugged into the eastern ELK restoration, so I don't
know of particular instances where CWD is shut down a
translocation or they haven't proposed it because of that. I
know in general, you don't right now. You don't want
to put servids on the train or in the trailer
(33:28):
and move them across the country without knowing a lot
about CWD, and it's just the easiest way to spread CWD.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
And it doesn't need any help right now.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
So transporting service is not a good thing right now,
and so agencies are are certainly justified in being careful
not to do that.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
CWD never fun to talk about, but unfortunately worth mentioning.
While on the topic, of present day restoration efforts. Let's
round this conversation off by hearing Jim's opinion on the
future of elk in the East. What do you think
the future of elk restoration is in the East, because
it's it's I wouldn't say that it's like and this
(34:11):
is this is just from my point of view. I
wouldn't say that it's a widely known thing. I wouldn't
say that it's like a like a hit this huge
inflection point out it's upward trending. But I would say that,
like if from the time that I was in my
teens until now, folks seem to be more aware of
(34:31):
elk in Pennsylvania, elk in Kentucky and Arkansas, Like what
do you what do we think the future is for
for elk being restored in the East?
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Yeah, I think people are more aware of it because
it's been such a success. It's been there's so many
states now that have growing elk populations. I think you
mentioned it's not an inflection, and that's a good point.
It's not like a lot of wildlife species we introduce.
Some they did grow a little bit and then they
kind of hid an inflection point and they just take cough.
If you think about like a hockey stick trape graph,
(35:03):
where they just hit this point where they take off
and they're super abundant. We're not going to see that
with eastern elk because the eastern half of the United
States is just so dominated with such a heavy human footprint.
They're not going to explode and have elk all over
the place. But I think there's a lot of room
for growth. There's a lot of places central Wisconsin, for example,
that elk population can grow a lot. There's a lot
(35:25):
of places where we can have elk and we can
grow existing population.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
So I think it.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
I think the future is optimistic to have more elk,
but it's always going to be in these populations and
states here and there. It's not going to be back
to the whole eastern United States again.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I just my mind goes It's like I wonder if
there will there will if it's realistic to think that
there will be a day where somebody thinks about elk
hunting and they don't just drift their mind to the West.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
I think for a lot of people, and especially in
those states recovering them, I think I kind of did
nine states that have elk hunts now, and I think
I counted ten states that have elk population, and that's
an awful lot of it, very limited, very restricted, but
that's an awful lot of states that have sportsmen and
women in those states thinking about elk in their own state.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I just wonder all the time, you know, what it
would be like to you know, there's not any elk
in Mississippi right now, but I'm like, man, how crazy
would it be if in September early fall you could
walk out somewhere in Mississippi and here in elk bugle.
That would just be just be insane.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
That would be yeah, I think. I mean.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
Elk are just another of a long line of examples
of sportsmen and women people that are interested and have
been restoring native species doing so, restoring some of these
native animals that otherwise wouldn't be restored. Bankers and lawyers
aren't going to get together in fund a restoration of
some of these species. But when they're restored like that,
(36:56):
everybody benefits. It's what we call a user pay everyone
benefits model, where sportsmen and women that are contributing that
money into conservation. It's the not the only money that
goes into conservation, but it's a large chunk of what
makes these kind of things happen. And when those populations
are restored. Everybody that goes camping and here's an elk
bugle in their home state, everyone that goes hiking and
(37:17):
sees a herd of out they're all benefiting from this restoration.
And that's not a new story. It's one hundred year
old story of restoration.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
I think there's a lot to be learned from the
story of elk in the Eastern United States, a lot
to be learned from our mistakes, a lot to be
learned from what sportsmen and women can do in the
name of wildlife conservation, and a lot to look forward
to in the future. I would encourage all of you
to check out the l courage closest to where you live,
dive into its history as well as what's going on
with it currently. I can almost promise you there's a
(37:48):
cool story to be found there. I want to thank
all of you for listening to back Woods University as
well as Bear Grease in This Country Life. If you
liked this episode, share it with a friend this week,
or if you want to have some fun, share it
with the worst elk caller that you have in your
(38:09):
contact list, and stick around because if this podcast was
an elk hunt, we've managed to cover some ground, but
he just bugled and he's still one ridge over. There's
a whole lot more on the way.
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support.
I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're focusing
in on the Star of September, the object of desire
for most hunters in North America, and the mammal with
(00:23):
arguably the most recognizable mating call out there. We're talking
about Elk, but not so much where they are right now.
That's too easy. We're talking about where they've been. I
(00:49):
remember the whole thing vividly. Every step that Elk made
come in my direction, filling the tension increase on my
bowstring as I tried to perfectly time my draw so
that he wouldn't see me, the bugle that he sounded
when he was just twenty two steps away. I can
replay all of it. It's like it lives on some
sort of greatest Memories highlights that just stays inside my brain.
(01:13):
Any hunter will tell you that while all hunts are
special in their own right, there's just some that stick
out more than others. In May of twenty seventeen, I
was told I was gonna get my first chance at
an archery bull elk, and I promise you I'm not
indulging the story when I say that I'm surprised I
didn't have to restring my bow because I practiced so much.
From that day forward up until the first week of September,
(01:33):
when I hit the interstate and headed west. Every morning
and every evening I was shooting. I was practicing at
further distances than before. I was shooting more arrows per
session than I normally did. I would even go as
far as running laps to get my heart rate up
so I could really get some practice shooting while my
heart was pumping. I was doing everything that I could
think of to get ready. I remember that first morning, myself, Will, Jordan,
(01:58):
and Troy hiking up the mountain the star at the hunt.
At dawn, the first sound of a piercing bugle hit
my ears and it fell on me like some sort
of dark cloud. It was a nerves butterflies in your
stomach type of feeling or downright anxiety that I had
never felt around a hunt before. Could I really do this?
Could I make the shot when it counted? Could I
hold it together when there was a one thousand pound
(02:19):
animal standing bow range from me when the biggest thing
I had ever hunted prior to was a white tail.
Could I do it? I mean, really, could I actually
do it? I didn't know. Days one, two, and three
of the hunt went by without me getting an answer
to that question. There was plenty of hiking, plenty of
hearing elk, seeing elk, and one really close call that
(02:40):
didn't quite pan out, And I remember the entire time
I was at a war inside my own mind, telling
myself constantly to quit worrying, that I had done the
work necessary to be ready for this and I needed
to enjoy it. But still the nerves persisted, and I'm
most sure that as much as I tried to hide it,
the nerves that I was dealing with was becoming fairly
evident to the group. I still remember Will saying to
(03:01):
me several times, stay calm, wait for the right shot,
and when it presents itself, slam Duncan you can do it?
I know you can. The morning of day four, we
glassed a small herd early about twenty to thirty head
of elk, mostly cows, with one big herd bull and
five to six satellites. We stayed with them, and we
(03:22):
watched them head up the northwest side of a mountain,
presumably to bed down. With the west northwest winds that
we had that day, we hatched the plans to circle
around the east side of the mountain and close in
slowly where we thought they would be betted. It took
us about an hour and twenty minutes of crawling through
live rocks and dense timber before getting to our intended spot.
The moment it truly started to get real is when
(03:43):
we crested a small rise and the wind that was
blowing in our face brought along with it the strong
scent of elk and rut. To my fellow elk hunters
out there that have smelled this before, you know exactly
what I'm talking about. Will quickly signaled for myself and
Jordan to creep forward as far as we thought we
could get and find a good setup. We slipped about
sixty more yards ahead before a deafening bugle let us
(04:05):
know that for one we were in the right spot
and two in no need of getting any closer. Will
dropped back about seventy five yards and began to call,
and chaos ensued almost immediately several bulls began bugling back,
cows began to mew. We heard twigs snapping, and through
the thick timber and shadows, we started to pick up movement.
(04:25):
The elk were responding so rapidly it's as if they
were wondering how these other elk that they were now
hearing managed to get so close to them without them knowing.
In a matter of minutes, I caught a confirmed glimpse
of antlers coming our way. As the seconds went on,
the glimpses became more frequent, until I finally got a
good look a young satellite bull walking in our direction.
(04:46):
And to be fully clear here, neither the young nor
the satellite attributes about this bull phazed me. I had
full intentions on shooting him. I drew my bow, and
although he closed in to ten yards, he stayed behind
a blown down tree top the entire time no shock.
After a few seconds of standing there at that close
of distance, you could see the bulls start to piece
(05:08):
together that something wasn't right. He threw his head back,
wheeled around, and began trotting back towards his group, and
my hopes began to melt. I remember thinking to myself.
He's about to spook the entire herd running back into
them like that. Thankfully, Will and all his experience saw
this happening and bugled right as the young bull was
running back, and immediately he was answered. This time it
(05:30):
wasn't a satellite, it was the herd bull. Will timed
his bugle so perfectly that he painted the picture that
the young bull was being run off by a new
bull down below. I saw him almost immediately, not glimpses,
not bits and pieces. I saw him. It's almost like
he wanted to be seen. He was fifty yards enclosing.
I remember watching his head tilted back as he marched
(05:52):
through the trees, the sun and shadows dancing off his
antlers with every step. As he closed into thirty five
yards on a steady march, his head went behind the
trunk of a large tree. I drew my bow and anchored.
Just a few more steps, that's all I needed, and
he would be broadside at top pen range. I had
a mouth call in and I was ready to stop him,
(06:14):
but there was no need. He stopped on his own,
perfectly broadside at twenty two yards and bugled. It was
like it was meant to be got. I remember looking
through my side at my pen saying to myself, there's
your shot. Smoked. I smoked it.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I smoked.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
In a blink, it was over. The next thing I
saw was white fletchings burying themselves a double lung shot.
I had done it. I couldn't believe it. I had
actually done it. Will came up and hugged me. Jordan
and Troy high fived me, and we followed the sixty
yard blood trail and recovered my first archery bowl. In
that moment, It's like all the nerves, butterflies, and anxiety
(06:57):
that I had been dealing with was flipped around and
compounded into the most surreal gratitude and satisfaction that I
had ever experienced in my hunting life. Archery l hunting
the ultimate as far as I was concerned, and it
had fully lived up to the hype. And I just
couldn't believe that I was standing there getting to experience
it like this. I'm not lost for words unless I
(07:22):
don't know what to say.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Man, holy smokes.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But now, as always, let's zoom out on all this.
Why am I telling you this story in the first place?
Why do I think it's important that you hear about
my first archery elk. When you think of elk hunting,
what do you think of? For me growing up, it
meant Primos's truth about hunting elk videos, the mantra of
go west, young man, because of course you had to
(07:53):
go west to hunt elk, right. I mean? There are
Western big game species, arguably the most iconic Western game species.
Everyone knows that, But has it always been that way?
You've probably heard of the Rocky Mountain elk. Heck, you're
probably familiar with the Roosevelt elk, but have you ever
heard of the Eastern elk? To sharpen all of us
up on this subject, let's dive into some quick history,
(08:15):
because while elk are, without a question of predominantly Western
species today, I'm going to answer my own question in
saying it's not always been that way. The following are
excerpts regarding the presence of Eastern elk in different states
throughout the country from a published paper titled Muri nineteen
(08:38):
fifty one. Elk of North America. In Arkansas, there is
one record to the effect that in eighteen thirty four,
herds of buffalo and elk still roamed in the northeastern
region near the Missouri boundary east of the Black River,
and it's reasonable to suppose that the elk originally had
a wider distribution in the state, but available literature does
(08:58):
not show it and lose Siana. A man named doctor
Milton Dunn wrote a letter documenting elk in the state
in eighteen twenty nine, and there's also a recorded killing
of a bull elk with a gross weight of seven
hundred and four pounds near Madison Parish on Walnut Bayou
in December of eighteen forty two. In the early days
of Illinois, elk reigns throughout the entire state, where the
(09:20):
prairies were preeminently their home, but they disappeared relatively quickly.
An explored named Micheau recorded one being killed by his
guide in seventeen ninety five in Sack County, Iowa. All
of the earliest settlers united in saying that elk were plentiful,
they were found from solitary individuals up to five hundred
and a herd, and they were known to be an
important food source, and that elkhorns were recorded being picked
(09:42):
up by the wagon load. In eighteen fifty six in Michigan.
In the early parts of the nineteenth century, elk were
common in parts of the Lower Peninsula. In Kentucky, elk
were abundant and were used as food by travelers. We
know this through famed stories like Dangle Boons encountering vast
herds of elk and bison. We also know of other
early explorers, such as John Strader, James Jaeger, and Colonel
(10:03):
Thomas Walker that documented great numbers of elk in Kentucky
as well. And this is just listing off a few
of the states in the East where there's record of
eastern elk. I think it's evident there's a bigger story here,
one that goes mostly unknown. And although I feel like
we've been here before, because this feels much like the
bison episode, I'm led to ask what happened. I mean,
(10:24):
I don't know about y'all, but personally, I think it'd
be pretty sweet if I could call in a bugling
bull in my home state of Mississippi. I mean, a
guy can dream, right, But more importantly, let's get some answers.
Jim Heffelfinger is no stranger to the Meat Eater Network.
He's also a bona fide servant nut or at least
that's what his Instagram handle would lead me to believe,
(10:44):
as well as being the wildlife science coordinator for the
Arizona Game and Fish Department. When I was scouring the
earth for a source on eastern Elk, it became evident
very quickly that Jim Heffelfinger was the man to talk to.
Here's Jim.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
There's less known about some of these iconic species in
the East because they disappeared so fast. The settlement started
east to west like a slow burn across the continent,
and you saw the disappearance of these animals that were
we think are charismatic because they are, but the bottom
lines is they were filled with meat and wrapped in leather,
and the early early people, early Europeans that came to
(11:22):
the continent needed.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
All that stuff. They were natural resources for them.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
So they disappeared pretty quickly in the East before scientists
got cranked up and naturalists started describing things and writing
things down. So that's why we know very little about
some of these that disappeared early. The map that I
sent you just showed that disappearance of elk really from
the east to the west, and the original the original
(11:47):
distribution of eastern elk. Strangely enough, it seemed like it
didn't cover the entire continent. It seemed to not go
out to the eastern seaboard all the way, which is unusual,
and it doesn't go all the way down to the
Gulf coast all the weather's probably the southern half of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama.
There really isn't good records of elk in those historic times.
(12:10):
If you go back to some of the fossil record
a couple thousands of years ago, you'll find some elk there,
but strangely enough, not at the time that people were
starting to record things along the coast there.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, because I noticed that. I mean, obviously, me being
from Mississippi, I keyed end on that state. And while
some of it is shaded the color for the eastern
elk range, it says no record of elk.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Right, Yeah, some of those southeastern states have no records
of elk, and some of them have just a few
in there, and so it doesn't seem like they came
down into Florida, Like, no records in Florida. Down into
Florida in historic times, there's a lot of old deer
fossils in Florida from the place of scene, and that
(12:53):
evolutionary history is an interesting one. But along the Gulf Coast,
along the eastern seaboard, they seem to have been in there.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, which is interesting because I thought, you know, when
I was doing, you know, a look into bison in
the eastern United States, there's a record of bison all
the way into northern Florida, so I would have thought
there would have been some elk in there too, But
there's no fossil record for it, at least.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
And that's all we can say too, is that that
we don't have evidence of it doesn't mean they weren't there.
Although a lot of these a lot of these fossil sites,
we have a lot of fossils of all these other
for example, grassland species, and so when you get one
that's missing, that's that it's a little stronger evidence that
maybe it wasn't there. We would we would be picking
(13:38):
up some fragments in there. But elk in the east
certainly coexisted in some of those open grasslands and certainly
in the central Great Plains with bison. And we're largely
a grassland and mountain species early on, and people people
sometimes say, well, the early elkward grassland species and then
they shifted to a mountain species.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
But I think they were.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Just at such broad ecological adaptability that they were in
the mountains and they were in the grassland. And then
when we took over basically the grasslands with our domestic
grazers and our development and over exploitation before we had
the conservation system we have now, they disappeared from those open,
vulnerable areas. And then they existed in some of the
(14:22):
areas with more security cover. And some of that was
the west and the Rocky Mountains. Some of it you'll see,
like one of the latest Eastern elk that was ever killed,
I think was in Pennsylvania, and so there was other
big blocks of forest that also provided that kind of
security cover that allowed those Eastern elk to hold out
the longest in some of those areas.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Okay, so we're getting a whole lot of good information here,
a better understanding of where these Eastern elk were, a
better understanding of when they started to quote disappear. The
fact that they didn't quite reach the eastern coastline, or
the fact that we don't have much or any record
of them in several Southeastern states like Mississippi or Alabama,
some of the habitats the eastern elk inhabited. But before
(15:04):
we get ahead of ourselves, I feel like there's a
very important question that we need to answer early. What
exactly is an eastern elk? Is it a subspecies? Is
it different than a rocky mountain elk? Is there any
difference at all.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
That's a good question because many people they start talking
about eastern elk as if they were a well defined
scientific thing, like a subspecies, Like you could go somewhere
in a book and find the physical characteristics of an
eastern elk and how it differed from other elk or
even more recently genetic differences. But the fact is, one
hundred years ago people took a box of crayolas and
(15:39):
started drawing color polygons on a big map and started
labeling these Eastern elk, rocky mountain elk, manitoban elk, and
coloring them differently, and then even describing them in scientific
papers one hundred years ago saying this one's darker, this
one's a little smaller, And in reality they had one
individual or two individual skins and skulls and museum. They
took a few measurements and they said, you know, this
(16:01):
is bigger, this is smaller. And that's what's happened with
most of our elk subspecies, and most of the subspecies
of a lot of things. They're thirty eight white tailed
deer subspecies in North and South America. Those certainly are
not valid subspecies. And so what we had was we
had if you go back a little further in the
Pliss scene, towards the end of the place the scene,
(16:21):
there was not the last glacial maximum, which was Wisconsin,
but before that was called the Illinois Glacial Maximum, and
that glacier, that glacial period, that ice age, drew up
and froze up a lot of the seawater and opened
up the Bearing Strait that people talk about a lot.
So we had elk coming over for the first time
in North America in the late Pliso scene, probably a
(16:44):
little more than one hundred thousand years ago, and that
was the first time we had elk in North America.
And then that Illinois Glacial period went away and melted
and we got into what they called the Sangamoni and Interglacial,
which is the interglacial between the Illinois and the latest
Wisconsin one. That interglacial period where it warmed up, freed
up the central part of the continent and allowed those
(17:06):
elk to flow the rest of the way in. And incidentally,
that's when the first primitive bison bison prisseus, came with
elk at the same time and poured into what became
the grasslands in North America. And that primitive elk then
turned into bison latifrons, the big longhort, long horned bison.
(17:27):
Then that turned into bison, bison, the recent bison. So
elk and bison have that evolutionary kind of North American
invasion history at the same time and occupied a lot
of those same areas in North America. So those elk
came in, they filled North America. They came almost to
the eastern seaboard, like we were talking about, and they
really weren't different. They just came in as one elk
(17:49):
and occupied that whole continent. And so when we talk
about eastern elk, and then we talk about the center
part of the continent, they call Manitoban elk, which is
the Great Plains, and then the Rocky Mountain elk which
are in the Rocky Mountains.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Those really probably were not any different.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
And when people have looked genetically at a few Eastern
elk specimens, and whenever they look at Manitoban versus Rocky Mountain,
they don't find any difference. So most of the elk
in North America were really just elk, and we shouldn't
get hung up on these subspecies. Now, modern genetics shows
a difference between the roosevelts which are in the Pacific Northwest,
and the Tuleialk, which are smaller antlers are a little
(18:27):
different in central California. There's some genetic differences there, but
those genetic differences are probably from the last couple hundred
years of just their ranges retracting into isolated pockets and
then evolving a little bit differently in small populations like
the tule elk. Almost when extinct, there was just a
handful of tule elk in California, and then they've come back,
(18:50):
and so there's a real genetic bottleneck there, and any
genetic differences may stem just from that genetic bottlenecking, But
I wouldn't we certainly shouldn't get hung up about Eastern
versus manitobin versus Rocky Mountain elk. They're really mostly our
labels that we've just put.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
On them, So Rocky Mountain elk, manitoban elk, Eastern elk
mostly just labels that we made up for the most part.
To quote Jim directly, elk or just elk, which leads
me to more questions. Because we see variances in body size,
we see variances in antler size. If elk or just elk,
would that mean that what we're seeing is more of
(19:27):
a response to living in different habitats and climates rather
than it being new to speciation right.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
Right, those are referred to just as ecotypes. So there
are in certain areas animals that live in a forest
versus grassland are going to start looking differently as they
adapt to those local environments. So if you look at
the eastern elk was first described by a naturis the
first described for science, not the first time someone mentioned
(19:54):
in elk, but first described for science in seventeen seventy seven,
and that was described based on a painting that someone did,
John James Audubon, who the Audubon Society was namesake. So
John James Audubon painted a painting of elk, and the
elk used were in eastern United States, so they were
(20:15):
eastern elk that he painted.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
All right, this is both a very important and highly
fascinating piece of this story, So lean in you all ready.
In seventeen seventy seven, an early naturalist by the name
of Exer Lebine was the first person to describe elk
for scientific purposes. Seventy years later, John James Ottobon does
a painting of eastern elk, and then in nineteen thirty five,
(20:39):
a man named Vernon Bailey uses Oudobon's painting to scientifically
describe this subspecies known as the eastern elk. To contextualize
that a bit, imagine that you're told that you have
to go and paint the next whitetail buck that you
get on your trail camera, and then a scientist is
going to be using your artistic expression to sign typically
(21:00):
describe animals. I don't know about y'all, but the natural
resource in science world is mighty lucky they didn't get
stuck with me doing paintings for references in the eighteen hundreds.
That'd been some bad descriptions. I'm just saying basing a
scientific description off of someone's painting as wild.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
You know, so when you think about someone describing as
subspecies and describing what color it is and basing it
on whatever color brown John James Audubon dipped his paintbrush into,
(21:40):
that's not really what we call science and good subspecies.
And in fact, they saw that that original painting was
in a book called Quadrupeds of North America John James Audubon,
until out of curiosity I had, of course, I had
to go see this painting that John James Audubon did
of Eastern Elk.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
I mean, I mean, honestly, it is a pretty good
painting as far.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
As yeah, not to take anything away from John's painting
for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
As far as scientific accuracy though you could see like
there's so much room for flaw though, as far as like,
here's how we're going to biologically describe this species is
based off this dude's artistic interpretation.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
And people have gone back and they looked at museum specimens,
they've measured a few skulls here and there, and they've
looked at skins, and so you'll see things in the
literature about this one's browner this one's redder, this one's bigger,
and they're not done with large sample sizes like we
know today you really have to do to capture any
kind of regional or subspecific variation in an animal.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Okay, so we all have a better understanding of the
Eastern elk, their distribution, which was fairly vast, as far
south as Louisiana, as far north as Minnesota, and as
far east as New York. Wild right, we understand that
though they had their own name, that from what we
can understand, they weren't that much different, if any, from
the Rocky Mountain elk today. But now it's time to
(23:03):
get down to the more important part of this story.
What happened to them? Where did they go? We need answers.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, it definitely it was over exploitation, just like white
tail deer. You think you would never be able to
wipe white tail deer out of large areas, but we
certainly did. When people are on the landscape and they
needed meat and they needed leather, they just took from
the local forests and once we had enough firearms in
the woods, that exploitation was too great for them to
(23:32):
keep up. And the same thing happened with elk. We
just don't hear about it as much because the bison
killing in the open plains was much more of a concerted,
focused effort in a shorter period of time, whereas the
disappearance of elk was just an exploitation rate that was
higher than the reproductive rate over a long period of time.
(23:52):
Kind of coming from the east to the west, wasn't
such a focused acute bison killing. You didn't have people
that we called elk hunters like our bison hunters out there,
and so it happened slower, and it happened on a
more local landscape throughout that whole eastern United States.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
But there's no doubt it was exploitation.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
And once we started introducing some laws in late seventeen
hundreds early eighteen hundreds to protect the wildlife that were there,
most of the elk were gone in all of those
areas by then.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
By eighteen eighties or so.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
According to historical accounts, when European settlers moved in, elk
didn't hide, but rather continued to roam where they always had,
Similarly to how many records reflect bison behaved towards the
early arrival of settlers foraging near settlements during the winter
months is one particular example of how they made themselves
out to be an easy target, and from the meet
(24:47):
and hide that they offered a very enticing target. And
to be fair, if you're an early European settler that
needs meet and hide for necessities, it's hard to toss blame. However,
there are some res records of the killing of elk
happening in grave excess, in quotes from men like Ernest
Thomas Setton, who said, there are a few stories of
bloodlust more disgusting than that detailing the slaughter of the
(25:11):
great elk bands. And look, I'm not here to villainize anyone.
That's not what this show's about, and it rarely ever
yields a positive result. Is there enough historical record to
show some of the Eastern elk killings happened purely based
off sustenance? Yes. Is there enough historical record to show
that some of the Eastern elk killings were blatantly over exploitive. Yes,
But regardless of what the intentions were, it does not
(25:33):
change the result. It's a deeply complex issue. I'm fascinated
by the relationship that humans have with their wildlife and
While it's clear that we are pretty much fully to
blame for the extra pation of Eastern Elk, we are
also to be accredited for the restoration efforts moving forward.
It's easy to look at our track record sometimes and
focus solely on the negatives, But where would that even
(25:55):
get us. Much of the wildlife and wildlife habitat destruction
happen in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and
people then don't have the gift of hindsight that we
have now. So I think it's more important to look
at what we have done since and what we can
do going forward. Theodore Roosevelt a man who's known for
many things, one of the most notable being the most
(26:16):
conservation minded president that this country has ever seen. During
his presidency, Old Teddy Roosevelt protected approximately two hundred and
thirty million acres of public land. What does this have
to do with the Eastern Elk, you ask, Well, let's
find out.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Once we started protecting them, and then eventually, and it
wouldn't take too long before restoration efforts started. Nineteen thirteen
was a big year. A lot of states translocated elk,
mostly from Yellowstone National Park in nineteen thirteen, and so
that started. That was the year Arizona started, the year
New Mexico started, I think the year Pennsylvania started. So
we started not long after their disappearance on the road
(26:55):
to restoration of a lot of wildlife. It took a
little bit longer for alcol course, but a lot of
states started elk restoration in the nineteen teens nineteen twenties.
They just weren't successful then, and in more recent times
in the last several decades had been much more successful
in areas.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Nineteen thirteen is when many elk restoration efforts began to
take place. And did you happen to catch where most
of these elk being used for restoration efforts were coming
from Yellowstone National Park? It makes you wonder how this
could have played out differently had Teddy not established this
place and others to be protected. Our actions have consequences,
and man, I am sure thankful for the positive consequences.
(27:36):
When the restoration projects first started around nineteen thirteen, was
that spearheaded mainly from like sportsman type groups like you know,
trying to restore resource that they were aware that they
had wiped out.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yeah, it always was the you know, the some of
the just the local people that didn't have that connection
with nature, that connection with these game species, or a
vested interest in having these game species healthy. They were
silent at the time. They just were lamenting the loss
of these wildlife and all of these bad people that
(28:12):
killed them. And it was really the people who had
this vested interest in these species and really liked these
species and realized that they were gone or going to
be gone. They're the ones that jumped up and started
getting money and started funding and finding and organizing restoration activities.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
What about those early restoration efforts, was there anything about
them specifically that made them overall not successful?
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Yeah, it was normally like just a few individuals they
would crate up a handful of elk and go release
them somewhere. And at the time nineteen sixteen, nineteen thirteen,
nineteen twenties, we didn't have game wardens all over the place,
We didn't have the law enforcement then to protect those animals.
There's even a few stories where a small nucleus of
(28:59):
elks started growing and rowing, and then there was just
rampant poaching that kind of cranked up and actually made
them disappear, made them grub them out or knock them
way down. So lack of law enforcement and just a
handful of animals being brought one time in release, which
we know now is not the recipe for successful restoration.
(29:19):
The people restoring elk at the time were pretty amazing.
When you look at the old photographs, they're they're piling,
they're capturing them in a big corral, like in the
winter in Yellowstone. The north end of Yellowstone. Gardener Montana
was a lot was a place where a lot of
elk were captured in Yellowstone and then shipped out of Gardener,
Montana and they just they just piled them into train cars.
(29:40):
The train just came to whatever state that was stopped somewhere.
They built some little wooden bridges and they bring the
elk down into like big wagons. In Arizona, there's big
wagons that they used lumber to build a cage around
the wagon. They shoved the elk in there, and then
and then they would take those wagons out to the
(30:01):
release site and release the elk. And you look at
the just the ingenuity and the engineering and just what
those people did to bring elk back into their native abbatats.
And we'll go and fly over with netguns and helicopters
and you know, capture fifteen to day and put them
in a air conditioned trailer and take them across the country.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Okay, so we know now why some of the early
restoration efforts failed. There was a lot of trial and error,
a lot of learning, and some need for law enforcement.
But we also know of some areas, particularly in the
eastern US, that have experienced successful elk restoration. So how
did that happen. There's been some successful restoration in Pennsylvania,
(30:48):
there's been successful successful restoration to you know, to scale
in Arkansas, in Kentucky. What's going on there? What allowed
it to be successful this time around?
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yeah, certainly it was probably overarching recipe for success is
to just have the population, just have people having more
of a conservation ethic and wanting to restore native species
and being interested in that. And we've also in addition
to just having general support everybody loves to see animals,
native animals being restored like that, but not only having
(31:23):
that conservation ethic, but having this large force of law
enforcement to make sure that laws to allow them to
not be killed and not be exploited. Now we can
protect those and then we know more about genetics. A
lot of times now we'll bring animals from three different
places where make sure we don't get one big family
group and release them as the nucleus for a restoration project,
(31:46):
which they may have done in the past with some animals,
but so we'll bring in genetic diversity, we'll release them,
We'll bring in multiple waves of animals to help that
be successful. We'll protect them, and we've got just a
lot of support from the public, which kind of relates
to a lot of money and funding coming in to
help fund all that.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Today, we obviously don't have the elk populations in the
eastern part of the country that we once had, but
we have seen notable success. There's states like Pennsylvania and
Kentucky and others that have restored elk populations high enough
that there's even a regulated hunting season. And there's other
states like Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia
and others that all have growing elk numbers. It really
(32:29):
is a conservation success worth noting and celebrating. But before
we move forward with any more restoration talk, there's one
factor that it would feel disingenuous to not mention. One
other thing that Steve brought up the last time him
and I were on a podcast that he was talking
about how one of the casualties of caused by CDWD
(32:53):
is some some ELK restoration efforts just because there's so
much controversy and worry around supporting live service right now.
How big of an issue do you think that is
going forward with alcaster restoration.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, there's not.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Much restoration going on in the West, and I haven't
been plugged into the eastern ELK restoration, so I don't
know of particular instances where CWD is shut down a
translocation or they haven't proposed it because of that. I
know in general, you don't right now. You don't want
to put servids on the train or in the trailer
(33:28):
and move them across the country without knowing a lot
about CWD, and it's just the easiest way to spread CWD.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
And it doesn't need any help right now.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
So transporting service is not a good thing right now,
and so agencies are are certainly justified in being careful
not to do that.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
CWD never fun to talk about, but unfortunately worth mentioning.
While on the topic, of present day restoration efforts. Let's
round this conversation off by hearing Jim's opinion on the
future of elk in the East. What do you think
the future of elk restoration is in the East, because
it's it's I wouldn't say that it's like and this
(34:11):
is this is just from my point of view. I
wouldn't say that it's a widely known thing. I wouldn't
say that it's like a like a hit this huge
inflection point out it's upward trending. But I would say that,
like if from the time that I was in my
teens until now, folks seem to be more aware of
(34:31):
elk in Pennsylvania, elk in Kentucky and Arkansas, Like what
do you what do we think the future is for
for elk being restored in the East?
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Yeah, I think people are more aware of it because
it's been such a success. It's been there's so many
states now that have growing elk populations. I think you
mentioned it's not an inflection, and that's a good point.
It's not like a lot of wildlife species we introduce.
Some they did grow a little bit and then they
kind of hid an inflection point and they just take cough.
If you think about like a hockey stick trape graph,
(35:03):
where they just hit this point where they take off
and they're super abundant. We're not going to see that
with eastern elk because the eastern half of the United
States is just so dominated with such a heavy human footprint.
They're not going to explode and have elk all over
the place. But I think there's a lot of room
for growth. There's a lot of places central Wisconsin, for example,
that elk population can grow a lot. There's a lot
(35:25):
of places where we can have elk and we can
grow existing population.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
So I think it.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
I think the future is optimistic to have more elk,
but it's always going to be in these populations and
states here and there. It's not going to be back
to the whole eastern United States again.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I just my mind goes It's like I wonder if
there will there will if it's realistic to think that
there will be a day where somebody thinks about elk
hunting and they don't just drift their mind to the West.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
I think for a lot of people, and especially in
those states recovering them, I think I kind of did
nine states that have elk hunts now, and I think
I counted ten states that have elk population, and that's
an awful lot of it, very limited, very restricted, but
that's an awful lot of states that have sportsmen and
women in those states thinking about elk in their own state.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I just wonder all the time, you know, what it
would be like to you know, there's not any elk
in Mississippi right now, but I'm like, man, how crazy
would it be if in September early fall you could
walk out somewhere in Mississippi and here in elk bugle.
That would just be just be insane.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
That would be yeah, I think. I mean.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
Elk are just another of a long line of examples
of sportsmen and women people that are interested and have
been restoring native species doing so, restoring some of these
native animals that otherwise wouldn't be restored. Bankers and lawyers
aren't going to get together in fund a restoration of
some of these species. But when they're restored like that,
(36:56):
everybody benefits. It's what we call a user pay everyone
benefits model, where sportsmen and women that are contributing that
money into conservation. It's the not the only money that
goes into conservation, but it's a large chunk of what
makes these kind of things happen. And when those populations
are restored. Everybody that goes camping and here's an elk
bugle in their home state, everyone that goes hiking and
(37:17):
sees a herd of out they're all benefiting from this restoration.
And that's not a new story. It's one hundred year
old story of restoration.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
I think there's a lot to be learned from the
story of elk in the Eastern United States, a lot
to be learned from our mistakes, a lot to be
learned from what sportsmen and women can do in the
name of wildlife conservation, and a lot to look forward
to in the future. I would encourage all of you
to check out the l courage closest to where you live,
dive into its history as well as what's going on
with it currently. I can almost promise you there's a
(37:48):
cool story to be found there. I want to thank
all of you for listening to back Woods University as
well as Bear Grease in This Country Life. If you
liked this episode, share it with a friend this week,
or if you want to have some fun, share it
with the worst elk caller that you have in your
(38:09):
contact list, and stick around because if this podcast was
an elk hunt, we've managed to cover some ground, but
he just bugled and he's still one ridge over. There's
a whole lot more on the way.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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