Elk!

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

The Cataloochee Valley in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. This is one of the famed viewing spots for Elk (Cervus canadensis) in the eastern U.S.

I presented a talk at the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference in Cullowhee, North Carolina back on July 17, and Shauna was able to come along on that gig. As an aside, that conference is one of the best plant conferences I have been to. Huge crowd of like-minded plant enthusiasts, the overall vibe is awesome, there's lots of knowledgeable speakers, and great field trips. As an enormous bonus, attending inserts you into one of the regions of richest biological diversity in the eastern United States. The mountains of western North Carolina are a botanical paradise in utterly stunning landscapes.

For us, it was an easy diversion to wend our way northward and through the Great Smoky Mountains and Tennessee on the way home. Targets were many on this return trip to Columbus, but Elk was high on the hit list. So, we made sure we were in the Cataloochee Valley bright and early and were rewarded with beautiful foggy landscapes.

It didn't take long to spot an Elk. Indeed, we about had to shoo this cow off the road. I had visions of distant herds in the foggy vegetated meadow in the first image and was looking forward to such scenes. It was not to be, and in this general area, this semi-tame cow was the only Elk that we saw,

Things would get better, though.

An Elk in richly forested habitat. The huge ungulates spend much time in woodlands, and I really wanted shots of them in forests. At one point, we came across a small group of cows in a grassy opening and were watching and photographing them when the herd began moving towards the forest, which was bisected by a beautiful mountain stream.

Anticipating their movements, we dashed into the woods and into a position that would allow photos of the animals in the woods, and hopefully, in the river if they decided to cross that.

Sure enough, and lucky us, the elk did cross the stream, and we were in position for shots. While many Elk photos that one sees are in meadows, that's probably mostly because that's where it is easiest to see and photograph them. Hence, my interest and shooting the ungulates in forested habitats, where they also spend much time, more so than the meadows, probably.

Elk are truly impressive mammals. Cows can weigh in excess of 600 pounds, and big bulls can eclipse a half ton. Watching the big beasts for an extended period in their forested habitat really made me think about the ecological role they must have played at one time, when they were far more common and widespread. Many plant species have coevolved with mammalian disturbance, such as the so-called buffalo clovers. There are two species of those, and one, the Buffalo Clover (Trifolium reflexum) seemed to favor more wooded environs than its more famous brethren, the Running Buffalo Clover (T. stoloniferum). Both clovers have become much rarer, presumably in part due to the loss of large ungulates such as elk and buffalo.

Unfortunately, humans hunted out Elk very early in the eastern U.S. For instance, they were shot out of Ohio by the end of the 1830's, and this was before anyone would have been documenting much if anything in the way of elk-plant relationships.

Here's a young bull Elk that I photographed in Presque Isle County, Michigan, on May 26, 2018. Like the animals that we imaged this year in the Smokies, the northern Michigan Elk are the result of reintroductions. Efforts to reestablish the big mammals have met with some success, and herds now exist in Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. However, the overall landscape is quite different than pre-settlement and there aren't that many large relatively unpopulated regions conducive to Elk reintroduction. Nonetheless, it's great to have Wapiti (the native Shawnee name ("white rump") back on the eastern landscape, even if only a minute fraction of the numbers that once existed.