South Dakota’s 211 elk records are nearly all a Black Hills record. Custer State Park alone accounts for 90 of them and Wind Cave National Park for 47, and Custer County’s 166 dwarfs everything else on the list, with Pennington, Fall River, and Lawrence counties picking up most of the remainder around the hills’ edges.
An elk island in the prairie
The Black Hills are a pine-forested island rising out of grassland, and the elk there live as an island population, cut off from the herds of the Rockies by miles of open plains. The original hills elk were shot out in the nineteenth century, and the herd was rebuilt from western animals released in the early 1900s, the stock that now moves between pine forest, meadows, and burns in Custer State Park, Wind Cave, and Black Hills National Forest. Outside the hills, scattered records in counties like Harding mark wanderers, not established herds.
A calving-season crest
Reports run strongest from May through July, led by 48 in May. Late May and June is when cows leave the herd to calve, and a cow with a newborn hidden in the grass is the most dangerous elk in the hills, quick to charge anything that strays close. The September rut brings bugling bulls into the open meadows, a second season when the animals are conspicuous and least tolerant of approach.
Status in South Dakota
NatureServe ranks elk S5, Secure, in South Dakota, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
