Arizona elk headed to W. Virginia as East looks to undo native species' regional extinction

RAYMOND WILDLIFE AREA — Dozens of Arizona elk will soon roam southern West Virginia’s reclaimed coal fields, bugling a call of the wild not heard in the Mountain State for more than a century.

The Arizona Game and Fish Commission last year voted to send 60 elk to help the effort. In late January a team of wildlife managers and volunteers captured and quarantined the animals at this state wildlife viewing area in the piñon-juniper scrublands between Flagstaff and Winslow.

The animals will head east on a double-decker cattle truck once they're confirmed to be disease-free.

A subspecies of elk thrived in eastern states until 19th-century development and unregulated hunting wiped out the herds.

Restoring native fauna is “every wildlife biologist’s goal,” West Virginia Division of Natural Resources Director Stephen McDaniel said while a helicopter ferried lightly sedated and blindfolded elk one at a time from the hills to a holding corral.

“We are the ones who drove them out,” McDaniel said of his state’s former elk herds, “so we are the ones who should re-establish them.”

West Virginia is paying for the capture and transfer, with help from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

An echo of another gift

Arizona’s gift is an echo of the one that it received more than a century ago from Yellowstone National Park.

Hunting and ranching had killed off the Southwest’s native Merriam’s elk by 1906. A decade later Arizona received its first shipment of Rocky Mountain elk from Yellowstone. Those elk and subsequent transplants grew by the thousands during the second half of the 20th century, and after the turn of this century, Arizona donated some of them to Kentucky.

After the fall hunt, Arizona had about 45,000 elk, said Amber Munig, big-game program supervisor for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Kentucky now has more than 12,000, McDaniel said, and West Virginia hopes its new herd may mingle and grow with those and another population that Virginia is building.

To start, West Virginia will place 250 elk from Arizona and Kentucky in the newly flat valleys between mountaintop mine sites.

Mountaintop removal mining is a controversial strip-mining technique in which coal companies blast away peaks to remove the earth above a coal seam. Then they fill the adjacent valley with the rubble, creating a flatter landscape. Where the elk are heading, these wastelands have been covered and seeded with grass, creating more open grazing lands than occurred naturally.

The state also hopes to attract wildlife viewers to small communities that have suffered as the mines closed.

“It’s the perfect place to restore elk into West Virginia,” McDaniel said.

The day of the capture

A contracted helicopter crew captured the elk by firing a rifle loaded with a net rather than bullets. The elk spend much of their time on nearby national forest lands, but descend onto the wildlife area and surrounding ranches during winter. 

After netting an individual, the helicopter dropped a wrangler to hobble the animal's legs, cover the eyes and inject a sedative. The team wrapped the elk in a bag and suspended it by cable under the helicopter, its head jutting out the top of the bag, and flew it back to the corral area where a veterinary team waited.

Arizona Game and Fish veterinarian Anne Justice-Allen oversaw a crew that took vital signs and applied numbered ear tags, tracking collars and identification chips. Volunteers watered down animals with elevated temperatures from the chase, and in at least one case gave intravenous fluids to an overheated elk.

“They’re all looking really good,” Justice-Allen said.

Once inspected and tagged, the elk entered a pen and huddled together in a corner. Felt on the tall fences blocked their views of the open range.

Healthy animals for the new herd

Arizona’s elk are ideal for restocking former elk ranges in part because they are not known to carry diseases afflicting Rocky Mountain herds elsewhere. They have never been known to suffer the neurological disorder called chronic wasting disease, and decades of testing have never turned up the brucellosis that affects elk and scares cattle ranchers in the Yellowstone region.

The quarantine will help ensure they don’t have tuberculosis.

Arizona’s elk weigh 600 pounds or more as adults, and the bulls are renowned for large antlers.

“It’s a great source population,” Munig said, and “a great conservation effort for us — something we are very proud to be able to assist in.”

The herds east of Flagstaff are on the upswing and can spare the captured animals, she said.

Some Arizona hunters dislike the idea of sending any elk out of state, said Steve Clark, executive director of the Arizona Elk Society.  But his organization sees only goodwill and a “partnership with the people of the United States.” The society fed the crew working the roundup. 

It’s all one way of giving thanks for a long-ago gift from Yellowstone.

“Why not give back to the United States?” Clark said.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at OurGrandAZ on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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