For my son’s last day of summer
vacation, I took off from my veterinarian practice, and off we went
to northern Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. We
climbed around on some boulders, got rained on and we saw elk, lots
of elk.
I have seen my share of elk throughout the West,
but this particular group we observed were a ragtag group indeed.
One bull sported last fall’s polished antlers still stuck on
his head; several spike bulls carried stunted sets in velvet. The
lady elk around them seemed utterly disinterested in this group of
males, as if they were seriously considering forming a commune and
foregoing the upcoming rut altogether. With boyfriends like that in
the offing, who could blame them?
The aspen stands behind
these elk had been pruned to precisely elk-snout height. We walked
along a stream in the park and noticed that the willows lining its
banks were pretty much chewed to the nubs.I am not the only one to
have noticed the sorry-looking bulls, disenchanted cows and absence
of shrubbery.
The Park Service is now examining various
alternatives to deal with a surfeit of elk with little else to do
but eat the place to the ground and collide with tourists’
automobiles. Proposed alternatives make for interesting reading;
They include everything from “culling” elk with high-powered rifles
to placing lady elk on the pill. I was nearly surprised not to see
a faith-based initiative to preach abstinence to nubile young elk
cows, but I digress.
Buried within the glossy summation
of these alternatives was something even more creative: Alternative
D, Wolf Reintroduction. This is an odd turn of events for an animal
whose relationship with Westerners has been nothing but checkered.
No doubt more than one string of Newhouse #14 leg-hold wolf-traps
is still hanging around, oiled up and ready to go, in the odd shed
or barn. For it wasn’t long ago that the extirpation of every
last wolf constituted a national priority. (“We felt guilty and
ashamed,” said one government wolf-hunter on strangling wolf pups
dug out from their dens, “but it was our duty.”)
How did
wolves get in our way? In the latter part of the 19th century,
after market hunters had shot all the big game to feed the likes of
Denver, ranchmen went on to stock the land with cattle. They did
not take kindly to so many unemployed wolves about, particularly
since the slow-elk known as cattle were so incapable of defending
themselves. The wolves’ success was a major mistake. What Mr.
Newhouse’s steel traps could not ensnare, strychnine and
abrupt lead poisoning could kill with thoroughness.
In
1913-14, elk were hauled down from Yellowstone country and
reintroduced into Rocky Mountain National Park. What market hunters
had done, man would now undo. For millennia the wolf had been the
stone that burnished the elk to magnificence, but with the wolf
even by then a rapidly dimming memory, the elk population grew
largely unchecked.
Until the late 1980s, hunting worked
to slow the growth of the herds. Increasingly, though, land around
the park became off-limits to hunting as human settlement grew.
Habituated to humans, the elk sought refuge within the suburban
landscape of Estes Park. Today, the guns of autumn can’t keep
pace with the burgeoning herds.
Thanks to the Yellowstone
experience, there’s another option: bringing wolves back into
the picture. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in the 1990s
in part to help cull elk herds, to restore the balance, to bring
the elk in line with what the land will carry. Eager tourists
throng to the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone to howl with these gangly
predators; they just want to be among them. I have been there and
seen the wolves’ neatly boned kills strewn among the
late-summer grass, a windfall of carrion for the grizzly, the
wolverine, the raven.
In and around Rocky Mountain
National Park, there is chronic wasting disease, unsightly
roadkill, beaten-down vegetation. From Yellowstone country the wolf
looks on in amusement: “See what you have wrought?”
We
know the wolf is on his way back to Colorado. Some already lope
here all the way from Wyoming. Some, like the elk nearly a century
ago, might just get the VIP treatment, a ride home in a government
trailer plus three squares a day.
Welcome home, old lanky
dog. Be sure and eat the elk.
Rob
Cordery-Cotter is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a
veterinarian in the small town of LaPorte,
Colorado.
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