Virginia Wildlife Demo - 7

The stamps above remain a vestige
of Virginia history. Big game hunters,
pictured left, were required to have
one in their possession in order to
harvest elk during the mid-1930s.

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. e Natives smiled at this misplaced
fear and, gathering their bows, led the team
downward in the direction of the first crier.
ey knew well the mating call of the wapiti,
and what it meant for them. It was time to
hunt.
One hundred and ninety 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. e Eastern elk (Cervus canaden-

sis 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. e 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 co-evolved with.
It's diﬃcult to imagine today, as we rush
up and down Interstate 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 region. e ecological
past isn't all that far distant; sometimes, in
fact, it can be made to repeat itself.
e first attempt at reintroducing elk to
Virginia took place in 1917 at the behest of
big game hunters and centered on 150 "surplus" animals sent by rail car from Yellowstone National Park (at least a sixth of the
immigrants died en route) then trucked 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" (a term
germane to agronomy, misapplied to the
killing of animals) was usually in the single
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Virginia Wildlife Demo

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