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Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing
By JOHN FULMER
t’s fall and the sounds of love will once again fill the air in Elk Alley.
By that we mean screaming and bugling. Grunting and bellowing. Huffing and puffing from aggressively flared nostrils. The loud clack of antler-on-antler contact. Yes, it’s mating season for Pennsylvania’s wild elk herd, when the big fellows with an overabundance of chest hair look for the girl of their dreams. But it’s never easy. Faint heart never won fair cow.
“This is the time of year it gears up,” said Lisa Bainey, park manager at Cameron County’s Sinnemahonig State Park, which has a program of guided elk watches that lasts until October 20. “The bulls are vying for dominance over the herd. It goes on until the second week of October, but, usually by the first week in October, the big bulls, the dominant bulls are pretty worn out. There’s a lot of fighting going on. It’s interesting to watch because if there’s a cow in heat, they are just ravenous.”
During the “rut,” as it’s called, big, older bulls have to “bugle” like crazy all the time, hardly have a minute to eat, and must fight off lesser bulls to control their harems, which normally contain fifteen to twenty cows, though Bainey said some harems can reach twenty-five females. The rut is crucial to the bull’s legacy, but its rigorous demands—it can cause a twenty-percent body-weight loss—might spell his doom during the long, cold Pennsylvania winter.
The rut is the best time of year for elk viewing in the Alley, officially designated by the state as Elk Scenic Drive, a 127-mile loop made up of Interstate 80 between Exit 120 (Snow Shoe) and Exit 111 at Clearfield and five state highways. Route 555 from Weedville, in Elk County, to Driftwood, in Cameron County, and part of State Route 872 to Sinnemahonig State Park is where most of the action takes place. The elk range covers about 850 square miles and also includes parts of Clearfield, Clinton, and Potter counties. However, the town of Benezette, in Elk County, is Elk Central, and there are several public viewing areas nearby.
Also, a string of hotels, restaurants, and gift shops along Route 555 cater to the tourists who flock here in the autumn.
In the fall, a bull’s antlers will have reached their impressive peak, which can mean forty pounds of bone that’s four feet high. They’re a pretty effective weapon, and part of mating season’s fascination and fun—or horror, for the squeamish—is watching these massive creatures lock horns—or “antler wrestle”—as they battle over cows. This can be extremely violent and sometimes fatal, though Bainey said rutting deaths are a rare occurrence. There’s also comic relief, provided by adolescent bulls still perplexed by the proceedings.
“The yearlings are fun to watch,” said Bainey, who studied wildlife management at Penn State. “They’re totally confused because the hormones are kicking in and yet they want to be by mamma’s side.”
A full-grown bull elk can weigh up to 1,000 pounds—cows are more petite and usually maintain a svelte 500- to 600- pound figure—and a normal set of antlers has six tines per side. The twelve points give him the designation of “royal” bull while an “imperial” bull has fourteen points. The rut’s time can vary, but late September and early October mark the height of mating season. One thing that doesn’t change is the bull elk’s “bugling,” which is a signal that the rut is in full swing. The elk’s distinctive mating call has been described as a low bellow that continues as a squealing or whistle followed by several grunts.
Several elk-viewing areas, equipped with blinds and staffed by volunteers from “The Bugle Corps,” have been set up along the drive. An estimated 75,000 people visit Elk Alley in the fall, and the herd is now 800 strong, the largest one east of the Mississippi. Hunted to extinction in the Appalachians around the time of the Civil War, the elk’s reintroduction and survival here is a tale befitting a proud creature.
Today’s herd is descended from 177 elk sent in by train from Wyoming and South Dakota and set loose in ten Pennsylvania counties from 1913 to 1926; but only those twenty-four released in Cameron County and the ten reintroduced in Elk County thrived and developed a breeding base. Habitat loss and elk hunting, legal from 1923 to 1931, helped spell their decline in the other eight counties. The commonwealth put them under protection in 1932 and elk hunting was not made legal again until 2001. It is, however, a lottery-type hunt and only forty elk tags will be issued in 2007, with the $10 license fee going to farmers’ crop damage.
In the last twenty-five years, Bainey has worked indirectly or directly with the herd as part of several commonwealth commissions, and she said it was endangered recently until state agencies and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation stepped in.
“I can even remember when we almost didn’t have a herd,” she said. “This was back in the 1970s and early ‘80s. The numbers were very low, probably 100 elk.”
Several factors were in play, she said. The brainworm parasite, which attacks an ungulate’s spinal cord and brain, thinned out the herd, and without an effective fencing program to keep them from feeding on crops, elk were the target of angry farmers. Poaching was another concern.
“Plus there were not a lot of habitat-enhancement programs at that time,” Bainey said. “The foundation entered and helped with land acquisitions. Elk are grazing animals, like cows, and the Benezette area has a lot of reclaimed strip mines. It’s grassland and it’s a magnet to the elk. Plus it was remote.
“Tourism really became a factor in the ‘90s,” Bainey said. “Before that, you could come to elk country and you had to look hard to find one.”
More tourists may have guaranteed the elk’s survival, but the influx of visitors required a delicate balancing act. With the increased number of tourists, locals needed relief from the pressure the herd and herd watchers made on their lives. The infrastructure couldn’t handle it, Bainey said, and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the Game Commission, Bureau of State Parks, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation formed a partnership to address the concerns of Elk Alley locals.
“There needed to be some way to disperse the number of tourists,” Bainey said. So the partnership helped design the Elk Scenic Highway. “It guides the visitor along in an organized way, instead of the helter-skelter viewing that was occurring.”
A system of “elk etiquette” was instituted with the help of Bugle Corps volunteers trained through the DCNR. Responsible elk watching, Bainey said, is a combination of respect for the animal and local property owners, and recognizing that you, the observer, are very close to a wild, huge, unpredictable beast.
“What happens is you see an elk for the first time, and they’re so big and magnificent and incredible, people are just immediately drawn like a magnet to the animal and start taking pictures,” Bainey said. The viewing areas, with their hedgerows and blinds, provide protection and a good look at an animal in the throes of sexual ecstasy. Not an easy feat.
“It’s for their own safety because a 1,000-pound bull elk in full rut has only one thing racing through his mind,” she said. “And he’s not thinking about the park visitor who’s trying to get close to take photographs.”
Though she’s been close to the herd for a quarter century, like the arrival of fall foliage, the elk-mating season always seems like a surprise to Bainey.
“I’m always amazed. It’s a cyclical thing, and you look forward to it just like the leaves changing color every year,” said Bainey.
Watching the elk mate can have an immediate, elemental effect, she said.
“There’s nothing that compares to sitting out in a blind on a moonlit night and you hear that squeal of a bull elk and the responding bugle from another dominant bull,” Bainey said. “You can smell them. You can smell the musk. They come clashing together and you can hear the grunting and groaning and the sound of the antlers clashing.
“I think, if anything, it reconnects you with the natural world when you listen to those wild sounds. To me, it’s right up there with the howl of the wolf and that of the coyote.”
Guided Elk Watches
Where: Sinnemahoning State Park
Directions: The park office is on Route 872, eight miles north of the Route 120 junction, in Cameron County
When: Through October 20. Starts at 4:30 p.m.
Cost: $30 for families or $15 for individuals. A week’s advance notice is required
Information: sinnemahoningsp@state.pa.us or phone Jackie M. Flynn or Janet M. Colwell at (814) 647-8401
Description: Learn about these majestic animals and their habitats. After a short discussion on elk-watching tips, the guides will take you by van into the range to observe elk during the rut. A limited number of spaces is available and registration is required. Contact the park office to register or for more information. Park Manager Lisa Bainey said it’s a long program, so set aside some time.
“One of the women lives right in the heart of elk country and has a good pulse as to where they are,” Bainey said.
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