Bear Grease - Ep. 366: Backwoods University - Eastern Elk

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

It's September and everyone's mind is on bugling bull elk. Today they are recognized as one of the most sought after western big game species, but have you ever wondered if it has always been that way? In this episode, we dive into the fascinating history and mystery of the Eastern Elk. What were they, and what happened to them? We will cover everything from their first scientific description based off of a painting, to their hopeful future led by sportsmen and women. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're focusing in on the star of September, the object of desire for most hunters in North America, and the mammal with arguably the most recognizable mating call out there. We're talking about elk. But not so much where they are right now. That's too easy. We're talking about where they've been. I remember the whole thing, vividly.

Every step that elk made come in my direction. Feeling the tension increase on my bowstring as I tried to perfectly time my draw so that he wouldn't see me. The bugle that he sounded when he was just 22 steps away. I can replay all of it. It's like it lives on some sort of greatest memories highlights that just stays inside my brain. Any hunter will tell you that while all hunts are special in their own ride, there's just some that stick out more than others.

In May of 2017, I was told I was going to get my first chance in an archery bull elk. And I promise you, I'm not indulging the story when I say that I'm surprised I didn't have to restring my bow because I practiced so much from that day forward up until the first week of September when I hit the interstate and headed west. Every morning and every evening, I was shooting. I was practicing at further distances than before. I was shooting more arrows per session than I normally did. I would even go as far as running laps to get my heart rate up so I could really get some practice shooting while my heart was pumping. I was doing everything that I could think of to get ready.

I remember that first morning. Myself, Will, Jordan, and Troy hiking up the mountain to start the hunt. At dawn, the first sound of a piercing bugle hit my ears and it fell on me like some sort of dark cloud. It was a nerves, butterflies in your stomach type of feeling or downright anxiety that I had never felt around a hunt before. could I really do this? Could I make the shot when it counted? Could I hold it together when there was a 1,000 pound animal standing bow range from me when the biggest thing I had ever hunted prior to was a whitetail?

Could I do it? I mean, really? Could I actually do it? I didn't know. Days one, two, and three of the hunt went by without me getting an answer to that question. There was plenty of hiking, plenty of hearing elk, seeing elk, and one really close call that didn't quite pan out. and I remember the entire time I was at a war inside my own mind,

telling myself constantly to quit worrying that I had done the work necessary to be ready for this and I needed to enjoy it, but still the nerves persisted. And I'm most sure that as much as I tried to hide it, the nerves that I was dealing with was becoming fairly evident to the group. I still remember Will saying to me several times, stay calm, wait for the right shot, and when it presents itself, slam dunk him. You can do it. I know you can. The morning of day four we glassed a small herd early, about 20 to 30 head of elk, mostly cows with one big herd bull and five to six satellites.

We stayed with them, and we watched them head up the northwest side of a mountain, presumably, to bed down. With the west-northwest winds that we had that day, we hatched the plans to circle around the east side of the mountain and close in slowly where we thought they would be bedded. It took us about an hour and 20 minutes of crawling through lava rocks and dense timber before getting to our intended spot. The moment it truly started to get real is when we crested a small rise and the wind that was blowing in our face brought along with it the strong scent of elk and rut. To my fellow elk hunters out there that have smelled this before, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Will quickly signaled for myself and Jordan to creep forward as far as we thought we could get and find a good setup. We slipped about 60 more yards ahead before a deafening bugle let us know that for one, we were in the right spot and two, in no need of getting any closer. Will dropped back about 75 yards and began to call, and chaos ensued almost immediately.

Several bulls began bugling back. Cows began to mew. We heard twig snapping and through the thick timber and shadows, we started to pick up movement. The elk were responding so rapidly, it's as if they were wondering how these other elk that they were now hearing managed to get so close to them without them knowing. In a matter of minutes, I caught a confirmed glimpse of antlers coming our way. As the seconds went on, the glimpses became more frequent, until I finally got a good look, a young satellite bull walking in our direction.

And to be fully clear here, neither the young nor the satellite attributes about this bull phased me. I had full intentions on shooting him. I drew my bow, and although he closed in to 10 yards, he stayed behind a blown down treetop the entire time. No shot. After a few seconds of standing there at that close of distance, you could see the bull start to piece together. that something wasn't right. He threw his head back, wheeled around, and began trotting back towards his group, and my hopes began to melt. I remember thinking to myself, he's about to spook the entire herd running back into them like that. Thankfully, Will and all his experience saw this

happening and bugled right as the young bull was running back, and immediately he was answered. This time it wasn't a satellite. It was the herd bull. Will timed his bugle so perfectly that he painted the picture that the young bull was being run off by a new bull down below. I saw him almost immediately. Not glimpses, not bits and pieces. I saw him. It's almost like he wanted to be seen. He was 50 yards and closing.

I remember watching his head tilted back as he marched through the trees. The sun and shadows dancing off his antlers with every step. As he closed into 35 yards on a steady march, his head went behind the trunk of a large tree. I drew my bow and anchored. Just a few more steps. That's all I needed, and he would be broadside at top pin range. I had a mouth call in, and I was ready to stop him, but there was no need. He stopped on his own.

Perfectly broadside at 22 yards and bugled. It was like it was meant to be. I remember looking through my sight at my pen, saying to myself, there's your shot. Smoked him. I smoked him. I smoked him. In a blink, it was over. The next thing I saw was white fletchings burying themselves.

A double lung shot. I had done it. I couldn't believe it. I had actually done it. Will came up and hugged me. Jordan and Troy high-fived me, and we followed the 60-yard blood trail and recovered my first archery bull.

In that moment, it's like all the nerves, butterflies, and anxiety that I had been dealing with was flipped around and compounded into the most surreal gratitude and satisfaction that I had ever experienced in my hunting life. Archery elk hunting, the ultimate, as far as I was concerned, and it had fully lived up to the hype. And I just couldn't believe that I was standing there

getting to experience it like this. I'm not lost words that much, but I don't know what to say, man. Holy smokes. Now, as always, let's zoom out on all this. Why am I telling you this story in the first place? Why do I think it's important that you hear about my first archery elk? When you think of elk hunting, what do you think of? For me, growing up, it meant Primo's truth about hunting elk videos,

the mantra of, go west young man, because of course, you had to go west to hunt elk, right? I mean, they're a Western big game species, arguably the most iconic Western big game species. Everyone knows that. But has it always been that way? You've probably heard of the Rocky Mountain elk. Heck, you're probably familiar with the Roosevelt elk. But have you ever heard of the Eastern elk? To sharpen all of us up on this subject, let's dive into some quick history.

Because while elk are without a question of predominantly Western species today, I'm going to answer my own question and saying, it's not always been that way. The following are excerpts regarding the presence of eastern elk in different states throughout the country from a published paper titled Murie, 1951, Elk of North America. In Arkansas, there is one record to the effect that in 1834, herds of buffalo and elk still roamed in the northeastern region near the Missouri boundary east of the Black River. And it's reasonable to suppose that the elk originally had a wider distribution in the state, but available literature does not show it.

In Louisiana, a man named Dr. Milton Dunn wrote a letter documenting elk in the state in 1829, and there's also a recorded killing of a bull elk with a gross weight of 704 pounds near Madison Parish on Walnut Bayou in December of 1842. In the early days of Illinois, elk rains throughout the entire state, where the prairies were preeminently their home, but they disappeared relatively quickly. An explorer named Michaud recorded one being killed by his guy. guide in 1795. In Sack County, Iowa, all of the earliest settlers united in saying that elk were plentiful. They were found from solitary individuals up to 500 in a herd, and they were known to be an important food source, and that elkorns were recorded being picked up by the wagon load in

1856. In Michigan, in the early parts of the 19th century, elk were common in parts of the lower peninsula. In Kentucky, elk were abundant and were used as food by travelers. We know this through famed stories like Daniel Boones, encountering vast herds of elk and bison. We also know of other early explorers such as John Strader, James Yeager, and Colonel Thomas Walker that documented great numbers of elk in Kentucky as well. And this is just listing off a few of the states in the east where there is record of eastern elk. I think it's evident there's a bigger story here, one that goes mostly unknown.

And although I feel like we've been here before, because this feels much like the bison episode, I'm led to ask what happened. I mean, I don't know about y'all, but personally, I think it'd be pretty sweet if I could call in a bugling bull in my home state of Mississippi. I mean, a guy can dream, right? But more importantly, let's get some answers. Jim Heffelfinger is no stranger to the meat eater network. He's also a bona fide servant nut, or at least that's what his Instagram handle would lead me to believe, as well as being the wildlife science coordinator for the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

When I was scouring the earth for a source on Eastern elk, it became evident very quickly that Jim Heffelfinger was the man to talk to. Here's Jim. There's less known about some of these iconic species in the east because they disappeared so fast. The settlement started east to west like a slow burn across a continent. And you saw the disappearance of these animals that were, we think are charismatic because they are. But the bottom line is they were filled with meat and wrapped in leather in the early. early people, early Europeans that came to the continent needed all of that stuff. They were natural resources for them.

So they disappeared pretty quickly in the east before scientists got cranked up and naturalists started describing things and writing things down. So that's why we know very little about some of these that disappeared early. The map that I sent you just showed that disappearance of elk really from the east to the west. And the original distribution of eastern elk, strangely enough, it seemed like it didn't cover the entire continent. It seemed to not go out to the eastern seaboard all the way, which is unusual. And it doesn't go all the way down to the Gulf Coast all the way. There's probably the southern half of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama.

There really isn't good records of elk in those historic times. If you go back to some of the fossil record a couple thousands of years ago, you'll find some elk there. but strangely enough, not at the time that people were starting to record things along the coast there. Yeah, because I noticed that, I mean, obviously, me being from Mississippi, I key to end on that state. And while some of it has shaded the color for the eastern elk range, it says no record of elk. Right. Yeah, some of those southeastern states have no records of elk, and some of them have just a few in there. And so it doesn't seem like they came down into Florida, like no records. in Florida, down into Florida in historic times.

There's a lot of old deer fossils in Florida from the placocene, and that evolutionary history is an interesting one. But along the Gulf Coast and along the eastern seaboard, they seem to have been absent in there. Yeah, which is interesting because I thought, you know, when I was doing, you know, looking to bison in the eastern United States, there's record of bison all the way into northern Florida. So I would have thought there would have been some elk in there, too, but.

there's no fossil record for it, at least. And that's all we can say, too, is that we don't have evidence of it. It doesn't mean they weren't there. Although a lot of these fossil sites, we have a lot of fossils of all these other, for example, grassland species. And so when you get one that's missing, that's a little stronger evidence that maybe it wasn't there. We would be picking up some fragments in there.

But elk in the east certainly coexisted in some of those open grasslands and certainly in the Central Great Plains with bison and we're largely a grassland and mountain species early on. And people sometimes say, well, the early elk were grassland species and then they shifted to a mountain species. But I think they were just had such broad ecological adaptability that they were in the mountains and they were in the grassland. And then when we took over basically the grasslands with our domestic grazers and our development and over exploitation before we had. had the conservation systems we have now, they disappeared from those open, vulnerable areas, and then they existed in some of the areas with more security cover.

And some of that was the West and the Rocky Mountains. Some of it, you'll see like one of the latest Eastern elk that was ever killed, I think, was in Pennsylvania. And so there was other big blocks of forest that also provided that kind of security cover that allow those Eastern elk to hold out the longest in some of those areas. Okay. So we're getting a whole lot of good information here about. better understanding of where these Eastern Elk were, a better understanding of when they started

to, quote, disappear, the fact that they didn't quite reach the Eastern Coastline, or the fact that we don't have much or any record of them in several southeastern states like Mississippi or Alabama. Some of the habitats the Eastern Elk inhabited, but before we get ahead of ourselves, I feel like there's a very important question that we need to answer early. What exactly is an Eastern Elk? Is it a subspecies? Is it different than a Rocky Mountain elk? Is there any difference at all? That's a good question because many people, they start talking about Eastern elk as if they were a well-defined scientific thing, like a subspecies. Like you could go somewhere in a book and find the physical characteristics of an Eastern elk and how it differed from other elk or even more recently genetic differences. But the fact is, 100 years ago, people took a box of creolas and started drawing color polygons on a big mass.

and started labeling these Eastern elk, Rocky Mountain elk, Manitoban elk, and coloring them differently. And then even describing them in scientific papers 100 years ago saying this one's darker, this one's a little smaller. And in reality, they had one individual or two individual skins and skulls in the museum. They took a few measurements and they said, you know, this is bigger, this is smaller. And that's what's happened with most of our elk subspecies and most of the subspecies of a lot of things. There's 38 white-tailed deer subspecies in North and South America. those certainly are not valid subspecies. And so what we had was we had, if you go back a little further in the Placocene,

towards the end of the Placocene, there was not the last glacial maximum, which was Wisconsin, but before that was called the Illinois Glacial Maximum. And that glacier, that glacial period, that ice age drew up and froze up a lot of the seawater and opened up the Bering Strait that people talk about a lot. So we had elk coming over for the first time in North America in the late Pleistocene, probably a little more than 100,000 years ago. And that was the first time we had elk in North America. And then that Illinois glacial period went away and melted.

And we got into what they call the Sangamonian interglacial, which is the interglacial between the Illinois and the latest Wisconsin one. That interglacial period where it warmed up, freed up the central part of the continent, and allowed those elk to flow the rest of the way in. And incidentally, that's when the first primitive bison, bison priscius, came with elk at the same time and poured into what became the grasslands in North America. And that primitive elk then turned into bison, latifrons, the big longhorned bison. Then that turned into bison, bison, the recent bison. So elk and bison have that evolutionary kind of North American invasion history at the same time and occupied a lot of.

of those same areas in North America. So those elk came in. They filled North America. They came almost to the eastern seaboard like we were talking about. And they really weren't different. They just came in as one elk and occupied that whole continent. And so when we talk about eastern elk, and then we talk about the center part of the continent, they call Manitoban elk, which is the Great Plains.

And then the Rocky Mountain elk, which were in the Rocky Mountains, those really probably were not any different. And when people have looked genetically at a few eastern elk specimens, and whenever they look at Manitobin versus Rocky Mountain, they don't find any difference. So most of the elk in North America were really just elk, and we shouldn't get hung up on these subspecies. Now, modern genetics shows a difference between the Roosevelt's, which are in the Pacific Northwest, and the Tully elk, which are smaller. Antlers are a little different in central California. There's some genetic differences there, but those genetic differences are probably from the last. couple hundred years of just their ranges retracting into isolated pockets and then evolving a

little bit differently in small populations like the tully elk almost went extinct there was just a handful of tully elk in California and then they've come back and so there's a real genetic bottleneck there and any genetic differences may stem just from that genetic bottlenecking but I wouldn't we certainly shouldn't get hung up about eastern versus manitobin versus rocky mountain elk They're really mostly our labels that we've just put on them. Hmm. So Rocky Mountain elk, Manitoba elk, eastern elk, mostly just labels that we made up. For the most part, to quote Jim directly, elk are just elk.

Which leads me to more questions, because we see variances in body size, we see variances in antler size. If elk or just elk, would that mean that what we're seeing is more of a response to living in different habitats and climates rather than it being due to speciation? Right? Right. Those are referred to just as ecotypes. And so they're just in certain areas, animals that live in a forest versus grassland are going to start looking differently as they adapt to those local environments. So if you look at the, the eastern elk was first described by a naturalist. First described for science, not the first time someone mentioned an elk, but first described for science in 1777.

And that was described based on a painting that someone did. John James Audubon, who the Audubon Society was namesake. So John James Audubon painted a painting of elk, and the elk he used were in eastern United States. So they were eastern elk that he painted. All right, this is both a very important and highly fascinating piece of this story. So lean in. Y'all ready?

In 1777, an early naturalist by the name of Exer Labine was the first person to describe elk for scientific purposes. 70 years later, John James Audubin does a painting of Eastern Elk, and then in 1935, a man named Vernon Bailey uses Audubin's painting to scientifically describe the subspecies known as the Eastern Elk. To contextualize that a bit, imagine that you're told that you have to go and paint the next white-tail buck that you get on your trail camera, and then a scientist is going to be using your artistic expression to scientifically describe animals. I don't know about y'all, but the natural resource in science world is mighty lucky they didn't get stuck with me doing paintings for references in the 1800s. That'd have been some bad descriptions. I'm just saying, basing a scientific description off of someone's painting is wild. You know?

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Felps. helps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. So when you think about someone describing a subspecies and describing what color it is

and basing it on whatever color brown John James Audubon dipped his paintbrush into, that's not really what we call science and good subspecies. And in fact, I saw that that original painting was in a book called Quadrupeds of North America, John James Audubon. And so out of curiosity, I had, of course, I had to go see this painting that John James Audubon did of Eastern Elk. I mean, honestly, it is a pretty good painting as far as. Yeah, not to take anything away from John's painting, for sure. As far as scientific accuracy, though, you could see like there's so much room for flaw, though, as far as like, here's how we're going. to biologically describe this species is based off this dude's artistic interpretation.

Yeah, right. And people have gone back and they've looked at museum specimens. They've measured a few skulls here and there, and they've looked at skins. And so you'll see things in the literature about this one's browner, this one's redder, this one's bigger, and they're not done with large sample sizes like we know today you really have to do to capture any kind of regional or subspecific variation in an animal. Okay. So we all have a better understanding of Eastern Elk. Their distribution, which was fairly vast, as far south as Louisiana, as far north as Minnesota, and as far east as New York. Wild, right? We understand that though they had their own name, that from what we can understand, they weren't that much different, if any, from the

Rocky Mountain Elk today. But now it's time to get down to the more important part of this story. What happened to them? Where did they go? We need answers. Yeah, it definitely was over-exploitation, Just like white-tailed deer, you think you would never be able to wipe white-tailed deer out of large areas. But we certainly did. When people were on the landscape and they needed meat and they needed leather, they just took from the local forests. And once we had enough firearms in the woods, that exploitation was too great for them to keep up. And the same thing happened with elk. We just don't hear about it as much because the bison killing in the open plains was much more of a concerted focused effort in a sure.

shorter period of time, whereas the disappearance of elk was just an exploitation rate that was higher than the reproductive rate over a long period of time kind of coming from the east to the west. It wasn't such a focused, acute bison killing. You didn't have people that we called elk hunters, like our bison hunters out there. And so it happened slower, and it happened on a more local landscape throughout that whole eastern United States. But there's no doubt it was exploitation.

And once we started introducing some laws in late 1700s, early 1800s, to protect the wildlife that were there, most of the elk were gone in all of those areas by then by 1880s or so. According to historical accounts, when European settlers moved in, elk didn't hide, but rather continued to roam where they always had. Similarly to how many records reflect bison behaved towards the early arrival of settlers. Foraging near settlements during the winter months is one particular example of how they made themselves out to be an easy target, and from the meat and hide that they offered a very enticing target. And to be fair, if you're an early European settler that needs meat and hide for necessities, it's hard to toss blame.

However, there are some records of the killing of elk happening in grave excess, in quotes from men like Ernest Thomas Settin who said, there are a few stories of bloodlust more disgusting than that detailing the slaughter of the great elk bands. And look, I'm not here to villainize anyone. That's not what this shows about, and it rarely ever yields a positive result. Is there enough historical record to show some of the Eastern Elk killings happened purely based off sustenance? Yes. Is there enough historical record to show that some of the Eastern Elk killings were blatantly over-exploitative? Yes. But regardless of what the intentions were, it does not change the result. It's a deeply complex issue.

I'm fascinated by the relationship that humans have with their wildlife. And while it's clear that we are pretty much fully to blame for the extrapation of Eastern Elk, we are also to be accredited for the restoration efforts moving forward. It's easy to look at our track record sometimes and focus solely on the negatives. But where would that even get us? Much of the wildlife and wildlife habitat destruction happened in the 1800s and early 1900s, and people then don't have the gift of hindsight that we have now. So I think it's more important to look at what we have done since and what we can do going forward.

Theodore Roosevelt, a man who's known for many things, one of the most notable being the most conservation-minded president that this country has ever seen. During his presidency, old Teddy Roosevelt protected approximately 230 million acres of public land. What does this have to do with the eastern elk, you ask? Well, let's find out. Once we started protecting them, and then eventually, and it wouldn't take too long before restoration efforts started, 1913 was a big year. A lot of states translocated elk, mostly from Yellowstone National Park, in 1913. And so that started.

That was the year Arizona started, the year New Mexico started, I think the year Pennsylvania started. So we started not long after their disappearance on the road to restoration of a lot of wildlife. It took a little bit longer for elk, of course. but a lot of states started elk restoration in the 19th, 1920s. They just weren't successful. And in the more recent times, in the last several decades, they've been much more successful in areas. 1913 is when many elk restoration efforts began to take place.

And did you happen to catch where most of these elk being used for restoration efforts were coming from? Yellowstone National Park. It makes you wonder how this could have played out differently had Teddy not established this place and others to be protected. Our actions have consequences. And man, I am sure thankful for the positive consequences. When the restoration projects first started around 1913, was that spearheaded mainly from like sportsmen type groups,

like, you know, trying to restore a resource that they were aware that they had wiped out? Yeah, it always was. You know, some of just the local people that didn't have that connection with names nature, the connection with these game species, or a vested interest in having these game species healthy, they were silent at the time. They just were lamenting the loss of these wildlife and all of these bad people that killed them. And it was really the people who had this vested interest in these species and really liked these species and realized that they were gone or going to be gone. They're the ones that jumped up and started getting money and started

funding and finding and organizing restoration activities. What about those early restoration efforts? Was there anything about them specifically that made them overall not successful? Yeah, it was normally like just a few individuals. They would crate up a handful of elk and go release them somewhere. And at the time, 1916, 1913, 1920s, we didn't have game wardens all over the place. We didn't have the law enforcement then to protect those animals. There's even a few stories where a small nucleus of elk started growing and growing. and then there was just rampant poaching that kind of cranked up and actually made them disappear, made them rub them out or knocked them way down. So lack of law enforcement and just a handful of animals being brought one time in release, which we know now is not the recipe for successful restoration. The people restoring elk at the time were pretty amazing.

When you look at the old photographs, they're piling, they're capturing them in a big corral, like in the winter in Yellowstone, the north end of Yellowstone, Gardner, Montana was a lot, was a place where a lot of elk were captured in Yellowstone and then shipped out of Gardner, Montana. And they just, they just piled them into train cars.

The train just came to whatever state that was, stopped somewhere. They built some little wooden bridges, and they bring the elk down into, like, big wagons. In Arizona, there's big wagons that they used lumber to build a cage around the wagon. They shoved the elk, there. And then they would take those wagons out to the release site and release the elk. And you look at

the, just the ingenuity and the engineering and just what those people did to bring elk back into their native habitats. And we'll go and fly over with net guns and helicopters and, you know, capture 50 in a day and put them in an air-conditioned trailer and take them across the country. Okay. So we know now why some of the early restoration efforts failed. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of learning, and some need for law enforcement. But we also know of some areas, particularly in the eastern U.S., that have experienced successful elk restoration. So how did that happen? There's been some successful restoration in Pennsylvania.

There's been successful restoration to scale in Arkansas, in Kentucky. what's going on there, what allowed it to be successful this time around? Yeah, certainly it was probably overarching recipe for success is to just have the population, just have people having more of a conservation ethic and wanting to restore native species and being interested in that. And we've also, in addition to just having general support, everybody loves to see animals, native animals being restored like that. But not only having that conservation.

ethic, but having this large force of law enforcement to make sure that laws to allow them to not be killed, not be exploited now. We can protect those. And then we know more about genetics. A lot of times now we'll bring animals from three different places or make sure we don't get one big family group and release them as a nucleus for a restoration project, which they may have done in the past with some animals. So we'll bring in genetic diversity.

We'll release them. We'll bring in multiple waves of animals to help that be successful. We'll protect them. And we've got just a lot of support from the public, which kind of relates to a lot of money and funding coming in to help fund all that. Today, we obviously don't have the elk populations in the eastern part of the country that we once had. But we have seen notable success. There's states like Pennsylvania and Kentucky and others that have restored elk populations high enough that there's even a regulated hunting season. And there's other states like Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and others that all have growing elk numbers.

It really is a conservation success worth noting and celebrating. But before we move forward with any more restoration talk, there's one factor that it would feel disingenuous to not mention. One other thing that Steve brought up the last time him and I were on a podcast that he was talking about how one of the casualties of, of caused by CWD is some elk restoration efforts, just because there's so much controversy and worry around transporting life service right now. How big of an issue do you think that is going forward with elk restoration?

Yeah, there's not much restoration going on in the West, and I haven't been plugged into the eastern elk restoration, so I don't know of particular instances where CWD has shut down to translocation, or they haven't proposed it, because of that. I know in general, you don't, right now, you don't want to put servids on the train or in the trailer and move them across the country without knowing a lot about CWD. I mean, it's just the easiest way to spread CWD, and it doesn't need any help right now. So transporting servids is

not a good thing right now. And so agencies are certainly justified in being careful not to do that. CWD, never fun to talk about, but unfortunately, worth mentioning while on the topic of present-day restoration efforts. Let's round this conversation off by hearing Jim's opinion on the future of elk in the east. What do you think the future of elk restoration is in the east? Because it's, I wouldn't say that it's like, and this is just from my point of view. I wouldn't say that it's a widely known thing. I wouldn't say it's like a like a hit this huge inflection point. Now it's upward trending.

But I would say that like if from the time that I was in my teens until now, folks seem to be more aware of Elkin, Pennsylvania, Elkin, Kentucky and Arkansas. Like, what do we think the future is for elk being restored in the East? Yeah, I think people are more aware of it because it's been such a success. It's been, there's so many states now that have growing elk populations. I think you mentioned it's not an inflection, and that's a good point. It's not like a lot of wildlife species. We introduce some.

They grow a little bit, and then they kind of hit an inflection point, and they just take off. If you think about like a hockey stick shape graph, or they just hit this point where they take off and they're super abundant. We're not going to see that with eastern elk because the eastern half of the United States is just so dominated with such a heavy human footprint. they're not going to explode and have elk all over the place. But I think there's a lot of room for growth. There's a lot of places. Central Wisconsin, for example, that elk population can grow a lot. There's a lot of places where we can have elk and we can grow existing population.

So I think the future is optimistic to have more elk, but it's always going to be in these populations and states here and there. It's not going to be back to the whole eastern United States again. I just, my mind goes, it's like, I wonder if there will, if it's realistic to think that there will be a day where somebody thinks about elk cunning and they don't just drift their mind to the west. Sure. I think so. I think for a lot of people, and especially in those states recovering them, I think I counted nine states that have elk hunts now. And I think I counted 10 states that have, um, elk population. And that's an awful lot of, very limited, very restricted, but that's an awful lot of states.

that have sportsmen and women in those states thinking about elk in their own state. I just wonder all the time, you know, what it would be like to, you know, there's not any elk in Mississippi right now. But I'm like, man, how crazy would it be if in September, early fall, you could walk out somewhere in Mississippi and hear an elk bugle? That would just be. It would just be insane. That would be. Yeah, I think, I mean, elk are just another of a long line of examples of sports men and women. that are interested in and have been restoring native species doing so, restoring some of these

native animals that otherwise wouldn't be restored. Bankers and lawyers aren't going to get together and fund a restoration of some of these species. But when they're restored like that, everybody benefits. It's what we call a user pay everyone benefits model. We're sports men and women they're contributing that money into conservation. It's not the only money that goes into conservation, but it's a large chunk of what makes these kind of things happen. And when those populations are restored, everybody that goes camping, and here's an elk bugle in their home state, everyone that goes hiking and sees a herd of elk, they're all benefiting from this restoration. And it's not a new story. It's a, it's a hundred-year-old story of restoration.

I think there's a lot to be learned from the story of elk in the eastern United States. A lot to be learned from our stakes. A lot to be learned from what sports men and women can do in the name of wildlife conservation, and a lot to look forward to in the future. I would encourage all of you to check out the elk herds closest to where you live, dive into its history as well as what's going on with it currently. I can almost promise you there's a cool story to be found there. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Greece and this country life.

If you like this episode, share it with a friend this week. Or if you want to have some fun, share it with the worst elk collar that you have in your contact list. And stick around, because if this podcast was an elk hunt, we've managed to cover some ground, but he'd just bugled and he's still one ridge over. There's a whole lot more on the way. First Lights fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use.

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