From West Virginia Public Radio:
West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources is taking a long look at the state’s growing elk population – an animal that last populated the state’s mountains in the late 1800s.
DNR wildlife officials have cameras trained to spot the 500-700 pound wildlife as it roams throughout West Virginia’s hills and valleys. The department’s assistant wildlife chief Paul Johansen said it’s by chance the elk are coming in from reestablishment programs in Kentucky and Virginia.
“Of course elk don’t recognize state borders,” Johansen said. “They have been observed here in West Virginia. As a result of that, our agency has engaged in a pretty extensive planning process to determine how best to manage that resource that the commonwealth of Kentucky has so graciously blessed us with.”
The elk are primarily found in West Virginia’s southwestern counties. As a result, Johansen said the organization needs to know the elk’s location to best know how to handle them.
“Part of that process is to identify where the elk are and come up with some kind of indices to look at abundance,” Johansen said. “The trail cameras are one technique we will use to monitor that elk population as it continues to be established in West Virginia.”
Johansen said there are concerns about the animal returning to the mountain state for the first time in more than a century.
“Whenever you put a large herbivore in the landscape like elk, you’re going to have positive benefits and you’re going to have negative benefits,” Johansen said.
“Certainly one of the concerns that many people have with regards to elk, especially if they’re in the wrong location, if you will, would be damage to agricultural crops, potential damage with regards to elk vehicle collisions.
“There are certainly a lot of folks, particularly hunters, that would love to see elk restored in West Virginia just from the standpoint of the recreational opportunities afforded by a reestablished elk population.”
West Virginia’s elk population will need to greatly increase before the game will be open for hunting. The DNR’s plan calls for at least 950 animals in a nearly 3,000 square mile area covering seven counties before any hunting activities could take place.
Elk (Cervus canadensis) should probably be referred to as wapiti. The “real” elk is actually what we North Americans call a moose, and the scientific name for the moose, Alces alces, refers to it being an elk. The deer North Americans call an elk was once thought of as a subspecies of red deer, but an mtDNA study of red deer and other deer in the genus Cervus found that our elk is actually more closely related to the white-lipped and sika deer of Asia than to the European red deer.
Some try to rectify this issue of nomenclature by calling C. canadensis “the North American elk.” This would work, except for two problems: Moose are found in Eurasia, and the wapiti is found in Central and Northeast Asia. These are the only deer with anything that approaches a Holarctic distribution. There are no roe deer or muntjac in North America, and the only white-tailed deer in Europe have been introduced.
So I like to call them wapiti.
Unfortunately, this word is so rarely used that no one knows what I’m talking about.
And trying to explain that Norwegian elkhounds actually hunted moose causes even more confusion.
And did you know that the eland antelope of Africa are also named after the elk?
I guess I’m reduced to calling them elk, even though the term is confusing and inaccurate.
Officially, West Virginia has only one species of deer. The white-tailed deer is very widely distributed. It’s the deer everyone hunts around here.
Kentucky reintroduced the elk in 1997 from thriving Western populations. They took to the milder Kentucky climate very well, and they have expanded throughout Eastern Kentucky. Currently, Kentucky has the largest elk population east of Montana.
The Kentucky elk range extends up to Kentucky’s border with West Virginia. This part of Kentucky is a major coal mining region, as is that part of West Virginia that lies across the border. There are a lot of remote areas in this part the country, and there are lots of reclaimed strip mines that could provide some open forage for the deer.
That means that they could easily expand into West Virginia. There was a well-publicized herd that popped up in Logan and Boone Counties, but they may not have arrived into the state on their own volition. It’s a lot easier to procure elk– including elk/red deer hybrids– than one might think.
However, it is very likely that Kentucky elk will make it into West Virginia. The state farm bureau came out strongly against the state introducing the species, but there is nothing stopping the Kentucky elk from moving into West Virginia.
Which is why the state is developing an elk management program.
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Officially, the last elk killed in West Virginia was in 1875.
However, I came across an account of an elk calf that was captured in the Bear Fork region of Calhoun County, which is a very remote part of the state. It’s actually not very far from where my grandpa grew up:
A party of hunters composed of Mark Farnsworth and Perry Cox, of Auburn, and Army Hardman, of Harrisville, passed through Glenville a few days ago with a subject of the animal kingdom now unknown in a wild state in West Virginia.
The party, including the wives of the members, was returning home from an eight-month camping trip on the waters of Bear Fork and Steer Creek.
They had a live baby elk — perhaps the last to be captured in this state — which was the chief object of attention among a whole menagerie of living denizens which had been captured.
Another very interesting specimen was a Belgian fox. This animal, a native of northern regions, is about twice the size of our native fox.
For seventeen days Mr. Hardman was lost in the forest. The last two days he spent in prayer to which, he said, he owed his deliverance.
The hunters had quite an array of small arms. Ten shotguns, eleven rifles, one French machine gun, firing 100 shots a minute and many smaller arms constituted their armament.
A mockin and rifle, which had been presented Mr. Farnsworth by ex-President Roosevelt and used by him on his South American trip, attracted a great deal of attention.
The “Belgian fox” mentioned in this story is a native red fox. In the Eastern US, these foxes are less common than introduced British reds. They never were common in West Virginia.
However, this elk calf could have been the last surviving member of its species in the state.
Until the Kentucky elk started wandering north and east.
When you read that this hunting party came with a French machine gun, you can see why elk and other large game didn’t last too long around here!
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There is a longer story on the West Virginia elk in the Charleston Gazette.
