Ruralite Cafe: Published 02/01/01

By Lisa Majors-Duff -News Editor

Is elk reintroduction really a good idea?

Possessing much the same traveling spirit as my father, I thought the trip sounded like a great idea. As the time to leave drew closer, I began to enjoy my first summer job even less. The green tights and the red Polyester, one-piece mini dress with cutout fringe on the skirt was getting old. (Yes, I was a Santa's Land elf - but that's another column.)

Many things about that trip stand out in my mind - watching part of a Cardinals pre-season football game from the top of the St. Louis Arch; the tranquility of camping beside Lewis and Clark Lake on the border between Nebraska and South Dakota as cottonwood trees shed their summer seeds, filling the warm afternoon sky with soft, snow-like beauty; hunting for mammoth fossils over the sun-baked hills outside Hot Springs, S.D.

But the one thing that stands out most in my mind is the abundance of wildlife to be seen in Yellowstone National Park. With the exception of a grizzly bear, I think I saw just about every one of the so-called larger animals that roam that part of the Rocky Mountains - bison, moose, gray wolf, trumpeter swans (trust me, these are big birds) and elk. With more than 2.2 million acres of wilderness, Yellowstone is undeniably one of our country's greatest treasures.

The National Park Service has decided to experiment with bringing one of these animals, the American elk, back to this part of the world. According to a NPS website, the American elk at one time was the most widely distributed member of the deer family on the North American continent. They were found from Mexico to Alberta and from sea to sea - including what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park - except on the southern coastal plains and in the Great Basin.

However, as the pioneers moved west, hunting took its toll. Elk began to disappear from the settled regions until only remnant herds remained in the Rocky Mountains, parts of the Pacific Northwest and Canada. In fact, the Eastern elk, which historically roamed the Black Hills, are extinct.

In 1914, Rocky Mountain elk from Jackson Hole, Wyo., were introduced into the Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. This reintroduction and others in the western U.S. have been successful for many reasons. But can elk reintroduction success in the west be duplicated in the east? I and other Cafe regulars wonder.

Frosty and I have been discussing the potential problems with the elk reintroduction project in GSMNP, keeping in mind that we want it to be successful. We sincerely hope that none of what we dread actually happens. As interested in the project as we are, we plan to be in Cataloochee Valley tomorrow (Friday) when the truck rolls in and the doors are open, allowing 26 elk from Kentucky into a 3-acre holding pen, where they'll stay until spring.

But what happens then? The first thing Frosty dreads is that one of these beautiful creatures will be shot, on or off park property. Park officials recently touted their successful prosecution of two Haywood County hunters who poached a deer in the park. But with every illegal poaching proven, how many go unsolved or undiscovered? Even with radio collars, park rangers cannot always follow these elk as they set about establishing themselves in their new home.

I've been wondering about how the population density difference between parks out west and our own Great Smokies will affect the elk when they leave the park boundary, and they will leave the park. Remember, Yellowstone is more than 2.2 million acres of protected, federal property in three states. The Smokies is made up of less than a quarter of that, at 520,269 acres in two states.

Whether the population around this park is made up of more hunters, I don't know. But I did do some research at the U.S. Census website and discovered that about 170,000 more people live in the Tennessee and North Carolina counties that border the Smokies than live in the Wyoming, Montana and Idaho counties surrounding Yellowstone. Taking into consideration that the western counties are made up of significantly more land mass, I also worked out that 8.2 people on average live in a given square mile out west, while 78.5 people live on a square mile around here.

With more people come more homes, fences, roads, dogs and bird feeders, a fact not lost on the park service, which says on another of its websites that accelerated development along western park boundaries threatens to diminish open space and traditional elk migration routes. The insanity of Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge in the summer must be the reason these elk are being released in North Carolina's Cataloochee Valley, which is surrounded by far fewer people than Tennessee's Seiver County.

I was about 15 feet away from the first and only elk I've even seen. We were driving through Yellowstone when we rounded a curve and there it was. Standing just off the road, the bull elk had a head full of antlers and a mouth full of grass. He was beautiful and big, really big. He may not have been the 1,000 pounds a full-grown male elk can reach, but he was huge. You think a white-tailed deer makes a mess when it gets in the way of a car or truck on the highway. Would either elk or driver survive such a collision?

Finally, I'm a little confused that officials with Great Smoky Mountains National Park have decided that 2001 is the best time to be reintroducing elk. I thought they were concerned with the number of visitors they have each year and the number of cars leaving behind exhaust, adding to an air pollution problem of epic proportion. Won't the possibility of seeing an elk bring even more people and cars to the Smokies?

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