The elk group that I’m involved with has started studying the local elk herds. We’re taking our $0 and the goodwill of the local community and translating that into scientific data.
the whole process has been very interesting. From writing and approving the plan (committees never do anything quickly) to gathering volunteers to implementing the data gathering, the whole process has been crazy. After the plan was written, the state agencies had to approve before it could be implemented. This wasn’t a real struggle as we had certified biologists involved, but I’d never seen anything like it.
The initial data gathering was a great surprise to me. After they put the elk out, blood, skin scrapings, feces and even a tooth are taken. It seems that these items give the greatest range of data – age, health, pregnancy, parasite load. The girth is measured and they put a collar around the cows neck. The collar will allow for tacking by triangulation later, showing the movements of the sub herd over time.
The initial data is showing that this winter was very hard on the herds. The elk are near to starving. This isn’t a big surprise, it just confirms that the elk have all travelled to the populated areas where the foraging is easy because people plant their yards full of goodies. this is exactly the problem, the easy forage brings too many elk into the area and they make the people crazy and themselves sick. Soon we’ll have better/more data to get the state to help us to encourage the elk to higher ground and out of people’s yards.
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