The bugle that carries across a valley
An elk bugle isn’t easily mistaken for another woodland sound.
From early September into mid-October, bull elk fill the mornings and evenings with the bugle. It’s a rising whistle that cracks into grunts and, from a heavy bull, a scream audible more than a mile away across open country. The call is both an advertisement and a challenge. A bull uses it to gather and hold a harem of a dozen to two dozen cows, and to warn off rivals drawn in by the sound. Through the weeks of the rut he wallows in mud soaked with his own urine, rakes his antlers through brush and saplings, and spars with challengers in shoving matches that occasionally turn serious. It is exhausting work. A rutting bull often burns through a fifth of his body weight, since he spends far more of the day displaying and fighting than feeding. The biggest bulls enter winter run down from the effort.
Antlers grown and cast every year
Only bulls carry antlers, and they build them fast. New beams can add more than three-quarters of an inch a day through late spring and early summer, among the fastest tissue growth of any mammal. While they grow, the antlers are sheathed in velvet, a living skin laced with blood vessels that feeds the bone underneath. By late summer the growth finishes, the velvet dries and is rubbed away against trees, and the polished antlers harden into weapons for the rut. A prime bull typically carries six points a side, and the full rack can span more than 4 feet. Sometime between late winter and early spring the antlers drop off entirely, and within weeks the next set begins to push up. Cows never grow antlers at all, which separates elk from caribou, the only North American deer in which both sexes are antlered.
Telling an elk from a deer or a moose
Size settles most identifications. An elk stands roughly 5 feet at the shoulder, and a bull can weigh three to five times as much as the deer that share its range, so a lone animal that simply reads as large is usually an elk. The summer coat is tawny tan over the body, with a distinctly darker, near-black neck and mane that turns grayer in winter. The creamy rump patch shows from behind at a glance. Mule deer and white-tailed deer are far smaller and lack that dark neck, and both carry their own tail and ear signatures. A moose, where the two overlap, is taller and much heavier again, near-black rather than tawny. Its pendulous muzzle, throat dewlap, and broad palmate antlers look nothing like the elk’s sweeping tines. Elk calves are born dappled with white spots that fade by their first autumn.
A western animal with a scattered eastern comeback
Elk today are overwhelmingly a western animal. The large majority live in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states. Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon hold the biggest herds, with strong populations through Washington, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and California. Farther east they survive as deliberately restored pockets rather than continuous native range. Reintroduced herds now hold in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Michigan, most of them small and closely watched. Across that range elk favor a mosaic of forest and open ground, feeding in meadows, parks, and grasslands and retreating into timber for cover. Four subspecies persist: the widespread Rocky Mountain elk, the heavy, dark-coated Roosevelt elk of the Pacific coastal rainforests, the small Tule elk of California, and the Manitoban elk of the northern plains. The animals turn up from sea level to high alpine basins, and where they settle is shaped less by elevation than by the reach of good forage and undisturbed cover.
Grazers that follow the snow
Elk are grazers before they are browsers. They crop grasses and broad-leaved forbs through the green months, then switch to shrubs, conifer twigs, bark, and any exposed grass once snow buries the meadows. An adult works through several pounds of vegetation a day. Outside the rut the sexes live apart. Cows, calves, and yearlings travel in matriarchal groups, often behind one experienced cow who sets the pace of feeding and movement. Bulls keep to smaller bachelor bands or go it alone through summer. Many herds migrate with the season, climbing to high summer range as the snow line retreats and dropping back to sheltered valleys when it returns. In the greater Yellowstone region, some elk move more than 150 miles between winter and summer ranges, among the longest land migrations left in the lower forty-eight states. Wolves and mountain lions are the main predators of adults, while bears and coyotes take a heavy share of calves in their first weeks.
Calves hidden in the June grass
A cow carries a single calf through a gestation of roughly eight and a half months and gives birth in late May or June, timed to the flush of new growth. The newborn weighs around 35 pounds and is precocial, on its feet within an hour and able to follow its mother within days. For the first weeks the cow leaves it lying still and camouflaged in tall grass, returning only to nurse, before it joins the wider herd. Cows breed for the first time at about two years old and produce one calf a year for the rest of their lives, with twins rare. Bulls come of breeding age at a similar point but seldom hold a harem until they are big enough to fight for it, usually at five to seven years. Wild elk live around 15 years, and animals in captivity can reach 20 or more. Cows tend to outlast bulls, which are worn down by the yearly toll of the rut.
From near-total loss to a million animals
Before European settlement the continent may have held on the order of 10 million elk, spread across most of what is now the United States and into Canada and Mexico. Market hunting and the plowing of their range collapsed that population within a few decades, and by about 1900 only a few tens of thousands survived in remote mountain refuges. Two subspecies, the eastern elk and Merriam’s elk, were lost outright and never returned. The recovery that followed came from hunting-license revenue, hard protection of the surviving herds, and repeated translocations. Many of those transplants came from the Yellowstone population and reseeded emptied range across the West and later the East. Numbers now sit near a million, and the IUCN lists the species as Least Concern. Elk are managed as a game animal across most of their range. They also carry particular cultural and economic weight on tribal lands, several of which run some of the largest elk programs in the country.
