JEFF HALLER/Yakima Herald-Republic file With the Stuart Range as a backdrop, an elk passes through snow near the Joe Watt Canyon feed site in the L.T. Murray Wildlife Area in January 2005. Fewer than three dozen elk from the Yakima herd died over the 2007-08 winter around the nine feed sites in the L.T. Murray, Wenas and Oak Creek wildlife areas. Links   E-mail             Print            Advertisement

YAKIMA -- On the first day of May, the Oak Creek Wildlife Area opened its gates to shed hunters who had waited patiently for the opportunity to scour the hillsides for the prized elk antlers shed over the winter and spring by bull elk.

And wildlife area manager John McGowan breathed a sigh of relief about what those hunters didn't find: carcasses of elk that couldn't survive the unseasonably cold spring or disturbance by the lawbreakers who refuse to abide by Oak Creek's March-April closure, created to protect those very elk.

"We had zero reports of fresh carcasses, from the (shed hunters) I talked to -- maybe a couple dozen -- so that's a really good sign. It shows our management is working," McGowan said. "That's what we want: We want to minimize disturbance and allow those animals to renew their energy reserves."

This year, it worked.

The nine Department of Fish and Wildlife feed sites that provide hay to wintering elk west and north of Yakima -- from Oak Creek west to Cowiche and the Nile and north to the Wenas and L.T. Murray wildlife areas -- lost only about 30 elk.

Other areas weren't as lucky. Volunteers in the Mount St. Helens Wildlife Area counted about 150 elk that didn't survive the brutal winter, by far the highest number of "winter-kill" elk on record at the wildlife area.

The Mount St. Helens herd, though, poses significantly different problems for wildlife managers than the Yakima herd. The 1980 eruption, says Yakima regional wildlife manager Ted Clausing, "created all kinds of open terrain and a lot of forage, and now a lot of timber is closing in again. You go through several decades with a lot more cover and a lot less food ..."

... and you end up with many more elk than the forage can bear.

Mount St. Helens Wildlife Area manager Brian Calkins says that the forage in an average winter there "can probably support about 400 animals," but the St. Helens elk herd has grown to nearly twice that size. The wildlife area has had an elk-feeding program for the past two winters, as well as a winter closure that went largely ignored by overzealous shed hunters.

"The first year of the closure," Calkins says, "we know we had some large-scale violation, probably by groups of people sweeping the area." The number of violators seemed to go down this past winter, he says, probably because wildlife area staffers began picking up and storing shed antlers as soon as they saw them instead of leaving them on the ground for collectors. "The word got out on that," Calkins says.

Winter always takes a toll on elk, the most popular big-game animal among Washington hunters, and 2007-08 was the type of heavy-snow, late-lasting winter that -- before Oak Creek began its winter feeding program -- would have littered the slopes with dead elk. Some years, even the feeding sites and the closures around them can't prevent mass mortality.

Over the winter of
2005-06, when the Cascades received heavy, cold rainfall throughout the early spring, Oak Creek lost more than
70 elk in and around the two headquarters feed sites and more than 100 overall, including the feed sites at West Valley, Cowiche and Nile Valley.

"That was a brutal spring on the animals. It was even worse for mortality than the hard winter we had in 1996," McGowan said. "That wet, cold rain soaks those animals right at the lowest level of their energy; they don't have blow dryers out there, so they have to dry with their own internal heat, and that takes a lot of energy out of them."

Of course, if they get spooked -- by premature shed hunters, for example -- they run away en masse, something that wracks their bodies like a bunch of pneumonia patients entering a 5K. "They're a herd animal," McGowan says. "One runs, they all run."

Hence, the winter closures around the feed sites.

Some people don't heed them, though. In mid-March, a couple of local shed hunters who were on a nearby ridge -- legally outside of the closed area, causing no disturbance to the elk -- were using scopes, hoping to spot shed antlers they could harvest after the May 1 opener. What they spotted instead was two people scurrying around in the closed area, finding sheds and stashing them for later removal.

The legal locals called the WDFW; enforcement officers caught and cited the intruders.

The trespassers, a couple from Idaho, "saw the signs and, I guess, temptation was greater than reason," said WDFW enforcement officer Alan Baird. "I think they were just opportunists and thought the odds were in their favor."

While failure to obey the posted closure signs is a criminal offense, though, it only brings with it a $109 penalty. While that may give pause to recreational shed hunters, it's less likely to deter collectors who intend to sell the sheds, which is why a lot of people in the wildlife community would like to see sharper teeth in the law.

"If they're doing it for money and they get caught, it's kind of the cost of doing business," says Baird, who two years ago caught a shed hunter in the Okanogan Valley who had "bellycrawled" directly under gate with a big no-trespassing sign. In that case, Baird cited the man for trespassing -- a more serious offense, a gross misdemeanor that can mean up to a year in jail as well as a significantly stiffer financial penalty.

Watchful citizens like the local hunters who reported the Idaho trespassers at Oak Creek are invaluable to wildlife managers. Like the volunteers of the department's "Eyes In the Woods" program, they keep the few -- the often-called
"2 percenters" -- from ruining things for everybody else.

"It's always the same few people. It's all a game to them," McGowan says. "They don't care about the resource damage or the impact. And they know we don't catch very many."