Return of a Native: The Virginia Elk
First published in the November/December 2013 issue of
Virginia Wildlife magazine
This piece is dedicated to the memory and spirit of Morgan Renea Funk, not a relation but an inspiration, both to myself and to all those working on behalf of wildlife and the natural world.
Anno Domini 1666. While across the ocean the Great Fire was leveling the wooden London of Chaucer and Shakespeare, that city’s royal representative, Sir William Berkeley, His Majesty’s Governor of the sprawling Colony of Virginia, dispatched a reconnaissance team of 14 settlers guided by 14 Natives to survey the unknown territory beyond the thickly wooded Blue Ridge Mountains, then fully ablaze in the splendor of autumn. Sixty years before Alexander Spotswood and his fabled Knights of the Golden Horseshoe crossed over Swift Run Gap, these initial agents of the Crown descended the steep western slopes and beheld an Edenic panorama: a verdant valley laced with rushing waterways, cradled on the farther side by a still greater mountain range and stretching away to the northeast and southwest as far as their eyes could follow.
Already the explorers could see that this lovely vale was home to plentiful wildlife, with droves of mighty herbivores ranging the valley floor. Deer browsed the riparian tree lines and immense shaggy wood bison grazed on lush bunches of switchgrass and big bluestem. A sharp-eyed Indian pointed out a pack of wolves lazing in the sunshine beside a gnawed deer carcass. A bear drinking from a riverbank raised its head to glance curiously at the visitors, muzzle dripping. As the Englishmen stared hungrily at the fertile fields before them, doubtless imagining stately plantations supplanting the wildlife, they heard from somewhere below a strange whistling shriek, like a coughing scream that bounced off the mountain bluffs and ricocheted down the valley. From the misty plains to the north came an answer – softened by distance but the same whinnying screech, a sound that sent shivers down their spines. The Natives smiled at this misplaced fear and gathering their bows led the team downward in the direction of the first crier. They knew well the mating call of the wapiti, and what it meant for them. It was time to hunt.
190 years later, in Clarke County at the northern tip of that same Shenandoah Valley, a man named Gus Tuley drew a bead with his musket and put an end to the two million year saga of the elk in Virginia. The Eastern elk (Cervus canadensis canadensis) was one of six subspecies currently recognized by taxonomists, and like the Merriam’s subspecies the Eastern elk is sadly extinct, the final known specimen falling to a hunter somewhere in central Minnesota in the mid-1890s. The Eastern subspecies was a giant, a holdover from the Pleistocene weighing over 1,000 pounds and sporting an antler rack six feet across. Given its strength, numbers and appetite, its vanishment must have had immense consequences for the vegetative communities and predators it had coevolved with.
It’s difficult to imagine today, as we rush up and down I-81 through a thoroughly domesticated landscape of field and furrow, strip mall and subdivision, that this land once belonged to such beings as mountain lions, wood bison, wolves and elk. But their legacies remain. How would you easily travel from Staunton to Craigsville if not through Buffalo Gap? How do you suppose the Rockingham County hamlet of Elkton earned its name? Even metropolitan Roanoke evokes its pre-Columbian past; its original moniker was Big Lick because the area’s abundant salt deposits drew bison and elk from all over the area. The ecological past isn’t all that far distant; sometimes, in fact, it can be made to repeat itself.
The first attempt at reintroducing elk to Virginia took place in 1917 at the behest of big game hunters, and centered on 150 “surplus” animals trucked from Yellowstone National Park (at least a sixth of the immigrants died en route) to nine counties west of the Blue Ridge and two to the east, including an unfortunate herd that in an act of ignorant hubris was dumped on the dunes near Virginia Beach, far outside the Eastern elk’s original range, and was promptly exterminated to appease irate vegetable farmers whose crops fell victim to the ravenous newcomers.
An elk hunt, the sole purpose of the reintroduction project, was instituted in 1922 but with only around 300 animals in the entire state the annual “harvest” (an insipidly agrarian term misapplied to the killing of animals) was usually in the single digits. By the 1940s the only elk left were in the mountainous southwestern counties of Giles and Bland and another small herd around the Peaks of Otter. In 1970 the elk was, for the second time, declared to be extinct in Virginia.
Mountaintop removal is a mining technique that maximizes the use of gigantic machinery and high explosives and minimizes the employment of miners to destroy mountain summits and expose the coal within. Wealthy extractive corporations have utilized this method of terraforming to good effect in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, with the end result being sated stockholders and large parts of Appalachia resembling post-war Hiroshima. In the late 1990s the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources decided to make the best of the state’s decapitated mountains which, once grown over with the sparse grasses that replaced annihilated hardwood forest, somewhat resembled mesas and might pass as habitat for imported elk from the West (subspecies Cervus canadensis nelson and C. c. manitobensis). From 1997 to 2002 there were 1,500 elk from a variety of Western states transplanted to 16 eastern Kentucky counties, and by 2009 the combined herds numbered some 10,000 animals ranging over four millions acres of public and private land, the largest elk population east of Montana.
Young bull elk, once they’ve attained sexual maturity and independence, make it a priority to set out for the territory ahead, mainly to get away from their old man, whose seasonal obsession with gathering unto himself an exclusive harem of cows (female elk) can bring intimidation and even personal violence down on the heads of other males, including close relatives. A wandering bull’s territory can be vast, covering thousands of acres as he looks for the proper balance of grazing, fresh water, cover, and available ladies. So it was inevitable that these wandering gallants would one day cross the invisible lines that separate these United States and turn up in Tennessee, West Virginia, and our own Commonwealth. Tennessee has released elk from Alberta into its own eastern mountains and that herd will certainly interbreed with Kentucky’s and increase both populations’ genetic diversity, but West Virginia has decided upon a “passive management” policy consisting of simply waiting for Kentucky’s spare bulls to move eastward (to be fair Kentucky is doing precisely the same thing with West Virginia’s westbound bears).
In Virginia efforts to assertively re-reintroduce elk began in 2000 with a DGIF feasibility study (by which time young bulls were already migrating over from Kentucky) headed by Wildlife Biologist Manager Allen Boynton, which weighed the habitat value of areas from southwestern coal country to Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park. Highland County, Virginia’s “Little Switzerland” with its plentiful sheep pastures and low human population, was selected as the most achievable locale to begin reintroduction, but the Southwest, where “(h)uman populations are relatively small, population growth is generally negative, few farms exist, and beef farming is the predominant form of agriculture,” was eventually chosen as the premier site because it was both the most politic (lower risk of negative interaction with farmers) and biologically promising (the area borders Kentucky’s own successful reintroduction region so genetic exchange is readily available).
And so after much study and deliberation in 2010 Buchanan County was awarded the horns of victory, and with a contribution of $450,000 from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, whose volunteers provided essential habitat improvement, Virginia welcomed home a resident who’d been gone far too long. Today our expanding elk herd numbers some 42 animals, and the Buchanan, Dickenson, and Wise County reintroduction site could support 1,000 to 2,000, depending on how many local residents are willing to allow. The first elk-hunting season held in Virginia since the nineteenth century is currently set for 2018.
There is a curious scientific theory gaining ground among conservation biologists that poses an interesting fact pattern: the removal of large animals, be they herbivores or hunters, from their native ecosystems causes reverberations all through the food chain, because whether you’re a half-ton elk chomping streamside rushes or a mountain lion springing onto a browsing buck, your daily activities, intentionally or not, impact a wide swath of living things. The reintroduction of extirpated megafauna (large animals), or, even more radically, the introduction of proximate substitutes for species that have been rendered extinct, can positively reassert the ancient balance that all of the biome’s flora and fauna had long ago adapted to.
When wolves were reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in the 1990s they swiftly reasserted their tradition role as top predator, causing a “trophic cascade” that impacted everything from salmon to grizzlies. The wolf presence kept the elk edgy and mobile so they didn’t overgraze the willows that stabilized and cooled the streams that provided salmon habitat, while leftover meat from successful wolf kills was claimed by opportunistic grizzly bears, and their population expanded on the basis of this surfeit of newly available food.
This notion of reintroducing or replacing species lost in the 500 years since European settlement is called “rewilding,” and it’s an exciting premise. In fact some scientists argue that the Columbian timeframe is too recent and arbitrary, and that a better choice would be to go back a full 13,000 years to the crossing of the Bering land bridge from Asia and the first human glimpse of a New World roaring with short-faced bears, mammoths, American lions and native camels – all of these extinct species could theoretically be replaced with their closet proximate living analogies: brown bears, Asian elephants, African lions, and Bactrian camels. This isn’t strictly theory, either; landscape-scale rewilding projects are currently underway in the Netherlands and Siberia.
But we don’t need to import elephants (much less cloned mammoths) to have a viable look at what rewilding can mean for our exhausted and emptied native America. We can simply look to the reintroduced wolves of the Rockies, the black-footed ferrets of the Plains, the California condors tilting above the Grand Canyon, and even here, in our own Virginian countryside. If you were to venture down to coal country on a crisp autumn day and listen carefully you might hear a close approximation of what set those panicky explorers’ teeth chattering over three centuries ago, the high piercing yodel of a native returned, the once and future Virginia elk.
Anno Domini 1666. While across the ocean the Great Fire was leveling the wooden London of Chaucer and Shakespeare, that city’s royal representative, Sir William Berkeley, His Majesty’s Governor of the sprawling Colony of Virginia, dispatched a reconnaissance team of 14 settlers guided by 14 Natives to survey the unknown territory beyond the thickly wooded Blue Ridge Mountains, then fully ablaze in the splendor of autumn. Sixty years before Alexander Spotswood and his fabled Knights of the Golden Horseshoe crossed over Swift Run Gap, these initial agents of the Crown descended the steep western slopes and beheld an Edenic panorama: a verdant valley laced with rushing waterways, cradled on the farther side by a still greater mountain range and stretching away to the northeast and southwest as far as their eyes could follow.
Already the explorers could see that this lovely vale was home to plentiful wildlife, with droves of mighty herbivores ranging the valley floor. Deer browsed the riparian tree lines and immense shaggy wood bison grazed on lush bunches of switchgrass and big bluestem. A sharp-eyed Indian pointed out a pack of wolves lazing in the sunshine beside a gnawed deer carcass. A bear drinking from a riverbank raised its head to glance curiously at the visitors, muzzle dripping. As the Englishmen stared hungrily at the fertile fields before them, doubtless imagining stately plantations supplanting the wildlife, they heard from somewhere below a strange whistling shriek, like a coughing scream that bounced off the mountain bluffs and ricocheted down the valley. From the misty plains to the north came an answer – softened by distance but the same whinnying screech, a sound that sent shivers down their spines. The Natives smiled at this misplaced fear and gathering their bows led the team downward in the direction of the first crier. They knew well the mating call of the wapiti, and what it meant for them. It was time to hunt.
190 years later, in Clarke County at the northern tip of that same Shenandoah Valley, a man named Gus Tuley drew a bead with his musket and put an end to the two million year saga of the elk in Virginia. The Eastern elk (Cervus canadensis canadensis) was one of six subspecies currently recognized by taxonomists, and like the Merriam’s subspecies the Eastern elk is sadly extinct, the final known specimen falling to a hunter somewhere in central Minnesota in the mid-1890s. The Eastern subspecies was a giant, a holdover from the Pleistocene weighing over 1,000 pounds and sporting an antler rack six feet across. Given its strength, numbers and appetite, its vanishment must have had immense consequences for the vegetative communities and predators it had coevolved with.
It’s difficult to imagine today, as we rush up and down I-81 through a thoroughly domesticated landscape of field and furrow, strip mall and subdivision, that this land once belonged to such beings as mountain lions, wood bison, wolves and elk. But their legacies remain. How would you easily travel from Staunton to Craigsville if not through Buffalo Gap? How do you suppose the Rockingham County hamlet of Elkton earned its name? Even metropolitan Roanoke evokes its pre-Columbian past; its original moniker was Big Lick because the area’s abundant salt deposits drew bison and elk from all over the area. The ecological past isn’t all that far distant; sometimes, in fact, it can be made to repeat itself.
The first attempt at reintroducing elk to Virginia took place in 1917 at the behest of big game hunters, and centered on 150 “surplus” animals trucked from Yellowstone National Park (at least a sixth of the immigrants died en route) to nine counties west of the Blue Ridge and two to the east, including an unfortunate herd that in an act of ignorant hubris was dumped on the dunes near Virginia Beach, far outside the Eastern elk’s original range, and was promptly exterminated to appease irate vegetable farmers whose crops fell victim to the ravenous newcomers.
An elk hunt, the sole purpose of the reintroduction project, was instituted in 1922 but with only around 300 animals in the entire state the annual “harvest” (an insipidly agrarian term misapplied to the killing of animals) was usually in the single digits. By the 1940s the only elk left were in the mountainous southwestern counties of Giles and Bland and another small herd around the Peaks of Otter. In 1970 the elk was, for the second time, declared to be extinct in Virginia.
Mountaintop removal is a mining technique that maximizes the use of gigantic machinery and high explosives and minimizes the employment of miners to destroy mountain summits and expose the coal within. Wealthy extractive corporations have utilized this method of terraforming to good effect in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, with the end result being sated stockholders and large parts of Appalachia resembling post-war Hiroshima. In the late 1990s the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources decided to make the best of the state’s decapitated mountains which, once grown over with the sparse grasses that replaced annihilated hardwood forest, somewhat resembled mesas and might pass as habitat for imported elk from the West (subspecies Cervus canadensis nelson and C. c. manitobensis). From 1997 to 2002 there were 1,500 elk from a variety of Western states transplanted to 16 eastern Kentucky counties, and by 2009 the combined herds numbered some 10,000 animals ranging over four millions acres of public and private land, the largest elk population east of Montana.
Young bull elk, once they’ve attained sexual maturity and independence, make it a priority to set out for the territory ahead, mainly to get away from their old man, whose seasonal obsession with gathering unto himself an exclusive harem of cows (female elk) can bring intimidation and even personal violence down on the heads of other males, including close relatives. A wandering bull’s territory can be vast, covering thousands of acres as he looks for the proper balance of grazing, fresh water, cover, and available ladies. So it was inevitable that these wandering gallants would one day cross the invisible lines that separate these United States and turn up in Tennessee, West Virginia, and our own Commonwealth. Tennessee has released elk from Alberta into its own eastern mountains and that herd will certainly interbreed with Kentucky’s and increase both populations’ genetic diversity, but West Virginia has decided upon a “passive management” policy consisting of simply waiting for Kentucky’s spare bulls to move eastward (to be fair Kentucky is doing precisely the same thing with West Virginia’s westbound bears).
In Virginia efforts to assertively re-reintroduce elk began in 2000 with a DGIF feasibility study (by which time young bulls were already migrating over from Kentucky) headed by Wildlife Biologist Manager Allen Boynton, which weighed the habitat value of areas from southwestern coal country to Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park. Highland County, Virginia’s “Little Switzerland” with its plentiful sheep pastures and low human population, was selected as the most achievable locale to begin reintroduction, but the Southwest, where “(h)uman populations are relatively small, population growth is generally negative, few farms exist, and beef farming is the predominant form of agriculture,” was eventually chosen as the premier site because it was both the most politic (lower risk of negative interaction with farmers) and biologically promising (the area borders Kentucky’s own successful reintroduction region so genetic exchange is readily available).
And so after much study and deliberation in 2010 Buchanan County was awarded the horns of victory, and with a contribution of $450,000 from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, whose volunteers provided essential habitat improvement, Virginia welcomed home a resident who’d been gone far too long. Today our expanding elk herd numbers some 42 animals, and the Buchanan, Dickenson, and Wise County reintroduction site could support 1,000 to 2,000, depending on how many local residents are willing to allow. The first elk-hunting season held in Virginia since the nineteenth century is currently set for 2018.
There is a curious scientific theory gaining ground among conservation biologists that poses an interesting fact pattern: the removal of large animals, be they herbivores or hunters, from their native ecosystems causes reverberations all through the food chain, because whether you’re a half-ton elk chomping streamside rushes or a mountain lion springing onto a browsing buck, your daily activities, intentionally or not, impact a wide swath of living things. The reintroduction of extirpated megafauna (large animals), or, even more radically, the introduction of proximate substitutes for species that have been rendered extinct, can positively reassert the ancient balance that all of the biome’s flora and fauna had long ago adapted to.
When wolves were reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in the 1990s they swiftly reasserted their tradition role as top predator, causing a “trophic cascade” that impacted everything from salmon to grizzlies. The wolf presence kept the elk edgy and mobile so they didn’t overgraze the willows that stabilized and cooled the streams that provided salmon habitat, while leftover meat from successful wolf kills was claimed by opportunistic grizzly bears, and their population expanded on the basis of this surfeit of newly available food.
This notion of reintroducing or replacing species lost in the 500 years since European settlement is called “rewilding,” and it’s an exciting premise. In fact some scientists argue that the Columbian timeframe is too recent and arbitrary, and that a better choice would be to go back a full 13,000 years to the crossing of the Bering land bridge from Asia and the first human glimpse of a New World roaring with short-faced bears, mammoths, American lions and native camels – all of these extinct species could theoretically be replaced with their closet proximate living analogies: brown bears, Asian elephants, African lions, and Bactrian camels. This isn’t strictly theory, either; landscape-scale rewilding projects are currently underway in the Netherlands and Siberia.
But we don’t need to import elephants (much less cloned mammoths) to have a viable look at what rewilding can mean for our exhausted and emptied native America. We can simply look to the reintroduced wolves of the Rockies, the black-footed ferrets of the Plains, the California condors tilting above the Grand Canyon, and even here, in our own Virginian countryside. If you were to venture down to coal country on a crisp autumn day and listen carefully you might hear a close approximation of what set those panicky explorers’ teeth chattering over three centuries ago, the high piercing yodel of a native returned, the once and future Virginia elk.
