By Jessianne Castle EBS Contributor
BOZEMAN
– A new blanket of snow covered the trees and towering cliffs of Gallatin
Canyon when Bozeman Area Wildlife Biologist Julie Cunningham started taking
tallies, seated in a fixed-wing plane earlier this winter. With light winds and
a temperature of 17 F at takeoff, conditions were ideal for spotting elk.
Cunningham
flew with a pilot over the timbered ridges and open meadows south of Big Sky,
looping from Porcupine Creek south to Specimen Creek and then east to Taylor
Fork and back north to Big Sky. She counted 636 elk, the most recorded in the
area during the annual winter flight in over a decade. Cunningham also counted
14 moose and 15 mule deer, both of which were increases from past counts.
During
the flight, Cunningham attempted to classify elk and record whether they were
cows or bulls, however this was somewhat limited due to the heavily timbered
area. She was able to spot at least 70 bulls, indicating that the bull-to-cow
ratio aligns with the 10 bulls to 100 cows minimum management criterion. She
said further ground-based assessments will occur throughout the remainder of
the winter to determine calf-to-cow ratios.
Flight
counts from the past five years indicate that the Gallatin Canyon elk
population is trending upward, but there are still fewer elk than wildlife
officials would like. In the area that includes Taylor Fork and Porcupine
Creek, and extends south to Yellowstone National Park, Cunningham says she’d
like to see 1,500 individuals on the landscape. This number was determined
based on the carrying capacity for the winter range, and is also the approximate
average of elk counts between the 1940s and 1980s.
“The
story of the Gallatin elk is a long one and an imperfectly understood one,” she
wrote in an email to EBS. During the last three decades, the area’s elk have
seen the reintroduction of wolves and a steady increase in the number of
grizzly bears.
“Concurrently,
the Madison Valley land ownership patterns changed and elk refuges were created
over on that side where they had not existed before,” she added. “Since
the earliest days of radio collars—1970s-1980s—elk always migrated between the
Gallatin and Madison as the winter conditions suggested, often in January or
February, or not at all. Now, elk seem to move early, as early as September, to
the Madison Valley and places that are difficult for hunters to access.”
Cunningham
also pointed to growth in Big Sky. “I am seeing elk using the Big Sky
subdivisions in some number, more than has been seen in prior years,” she said.
“I hypothesize elk are enjoying the shrubs and grass planted by homeowners, as well
as enjoying the ‘human shield’ from four-legged predators, as well as
exploiting refuge from hunters.”
Lee
Hart, owner of Broken Hart Ranch located three miles south of Gallatin Gateway,
said he’s seen changes in the elk migration patterns first-hand. Born and
raised in the area, Hart has operated as a hunting outfitter on National Forest
land in the Gallatin drainage for 50 years. “Way back when I originally
started, there were lots of elk,” he said. “I was the [only] permitted
outfitter in some of the prime hunting of the state.”
Following
the 1995 reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, Hart said he began to notice
a change, agreeing with Cunningham that elk started moving into the Madison
earlier. He also believes cow elk were losing their calves perhaps due to
predators, after seeing many small groups without offspring.
“They
just kept dwindling,” he said. “It got so bad, I actually had to quit booking
hunters. You can’t do justice as an outfitter claiming you’re taking them on an
elk hunt. … It’s hard to operate that way. I’m there to give guests an
opportunity to harvest an animal, but it’s gotten so that I feel sorry for
those elk.”
While
Hart was spotting fewer elk in the Gallatin, he began to see more elk making
their way onto his alfalfa fields in the southern part of Gallatin Valley where
the pressure from predators is less. “They’ve become urbanized elk. They don’t
go back to the mountains, they stay in the subdivisions,” he said. “There they
lay all day long, smiling at cameras. … The people that are coming here now
don’t know the background of what it used to be like.”
In
recent years, with the Gallatin population beginning to slowly recover, Hart
has had a few successful elk hunts, though he says they were pretty tough.
According
to Cunningham, it’s unclear exactly why Gallatin’s elk population is beginning
to trend back up.
“I
can’t say anything for a fact, but there are many possibilities,” Cunningham
said, adding that several hypotheses include the elk’s response to habitat-improvement
projects or to the generally light winters and good growing seasons we’ve had
recently. It could also be a result of conservative management policies, such
as completely limiting the harvest of cow elk in the area south of Big Sky for more
than 10 years. “Perhaps even wolf hunters and trappers have reduced or changed
local wolf dynamics, which could have influenced the herd. Perhaps [it’s] some combination
of all of this,” she added.
On
top of it all, Cunningham said she could be getting better at flight counting
after elk behavior changed following the cessation of logging in the 1990s.
Once timber sales halted, the forests grew thicker and elk began to forage in
smaller groups distributed in the denser timber, becoming difficult to spot
from the air. “It’s harder to see two cow elk hiding than 20 cow elk hiding,”
she said. “Perhaps your biologist is getting better at flying and counting as
she gets more experience.”
As
Cunningham and other state biologists with the Montana Department of Fish,
Wildlife and Parks continue to monitor the trends in the Gallatin elk
population, they will adjust management policies accordingly, though for the
meantime, Cunningham said she will continue to support conservative management
in this district.
Visit
fwp.mt.gov/fishandwildlife/management/elk for more information about Montana’s
statewide elk management plan.
