Pennsylvania’s 555 elk records draw one of the tightest maps in this atlas: nine counties, with Elk County alone holding 310 of them and Cameron, Clearfield, and Potter accounting for most of the rest. Nearly every named place sits in the same north-central plateau country, from Elk State Forest and State Game Land #311 to Sinnemahoning State Park and the Moshannon, Sproul, and Susquehannock state forests.
An extirpated native, brought back
Elk are native to Pennsylvania, but the original eastern elk were hunted out of the state by the 1870s, which is why NatureServe still lists the species as Presumed Extirpated here. The herd on this map descends from Rocky Mountain elk released between 1913 and 1926, western stock turned loose in cutover plateau forest that was growing back into good elk habitat. A century later the animals remain concentrated in that same reintroduction country rather than spread across the state.
The autumn crest
Record counts sit in the 20s and 30s for most of the year, then jump to 92 in September and 108 in October. That is the rut showing through: bulls that stayed quiet all summer begin bugling, moving in daylight, and fighting over cows, and a herd that spent the year dispersed in deep forest suddenly announces itself. It is also when elk are least predictable, and a bugling bull on a back road is an animal to give a very wide berth.
Status in Pennsylvania
NatureServe’s SX rank, Presumed Extirpated, records the loss of the original herd rather than the absence of elk today. The current free-ranging herd descends from the early twentieth-century reintroduction, and USGS NAS does not list elk as nonindigenous in Pennsylvania.
Full species profile
