Virginia Wildlife Demo - 9

bers some 42 animals, and the Buchanan,
Dickenson, and Wise County reintroduction site could support 1,000 to 2,000, depending on how many the local residents are
willing to allow. e first elk hunting season
held in Virginia since the nineteenth century
may occur as early as 2018.
uuu

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 closest proximate living
analogies: brown bears, Asian elephants,
African lions, and Bactrian camels. is isn't
strictly theory, either; landscape-scale rewilding projects are currently underway in the
Netherlands and Siberia.

Ron Messina

ere 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, intentional or not, impact a wide swath
of living things. e 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 to which all of the biome's
flora and fauna had long ago adapted.
When wolves were reintroduced to the
Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in the 1990s
they swiftly reasserted their traditional role as
top predator, causing a "trophic cascade" that

impacted everything from salmon to grizzlies. e 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.
is 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

©Leon Boyd

Virginia's elk herd appears to be thriving in the
mountainous terrain of Buchanan, Dickenson,
and Wise counties.

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 half-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 countryside. If you were to venture
down to Virginia 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. *
William H. Funk is a freelance writer living
in Staunton. He may be reached at
williamfunk3@icloud.com.
www.HuntFishVA.com
http://www.HuntFishVA.com
Virginia Wildlife Demo

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Virginia Wildlife Demo
