Virginia Wildlife Demo - 8

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 extirpated from Virginia.
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Mountaintop removal is a mining technique
that maximizes the use of gigantic machinery
and high explosives 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 that large parts of Appalachia
resemble 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 the hardwood forest, somewhat resembled mesas and-surprisingly-oﬀer
good 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 as many as 14 eastern Kentucky counties,
and by 2009 the combined herds numbered

some 10,000 animals ranging over four million 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, Canada,
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 Department (DGIF) feasibility study; at the time,
young bulls were already migrating over from
Kentucky. Headed by researchers at Virginia
Tech, the study 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
sparse 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 because it
was both the most politic (meaning, a lower
risk of negative interaction with farmers) and
biologically promising (bordering 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 num-
Virginia Wildlife Demo

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