ShareThisSACRAMENTO, Calif. - The sight of elk on a California landscape exerts a powerful emotional pull.
The enormous antlers, the furry neck and sheer size of this creature, standing tall in the grass, evoke a time when wildlife outnumbered people.
Thanks to intensive reintroduction efforts, it becomes easier every year to see elk in California. The species is doing so well that the California Fish and Game Commission this spring expanded hunting.
There is irony in this, since it was hunting that nearly exterminated elk in the wake of the Gold Rush. Tule elk, a subspecies found only in California, were reduced to as few as two animals -- one male and one female -- by the late 1800s, according to some accounts.
Extinction doesn't get any closer than that.
"It's one of the greatest wildlife success stories in California," said Joe Hobbs, a Department of Fish and Game biologist and state elk coordinator. "We're pretty much running out of places to put extra elk."
There are now about 3,900 tule elk statewide in 22 herds. Because its historic predators -- grizzly bears and wolves -- did go extinct in California, hunting is the only way to keep elk out of conflict with farms and cities that have crept into former habitat.
Hunting remains tightly controlled, but the state is loosening up somewhat. This year, it will issue a total of about 350 permits, up from 330 last year, Hobbs said.
Demand for these permits is huge: In 2009, about 26,000 hunters applied.
This year, the state added new hunting zones in many areas, including Lake, Colusa, Mendocino, Alameda, Stanislaus and Merced counties. This means each area now has a stable elk population for the first time in perhaps a century.
Much of the success comes from private property owners who have let the state reintroduce elk on their land. This is important, Hobbs said, because there is little suitable public land left in the state to hold additional elk -- especially tule elk, which rely mainly on open grasslands.
The state's two other species -- Roosevelt and Rocky Mountain elk -- live mainly in forests and also have seen their populations grow.
"Finding new areas that don't come with conflicts from either agriculture or other neighbors is very difficult," said Hobbs. "Elk do eat grass, they compete with cattle, and they will break fences."
The road to recovery for the elk has hardly been smooth, however. In early reintroduction efforts, a few herds went extinct because of disease or inadequate food.
State officials allowed hunting to resume in the 1960s, which may have been premature. Public protests led to state and federal laws that banned hunting until 1989, and also required more reintroduction efforts.
Problems still emerge today, notably with tule elk reintroduced at Point Reyes National Seashore. Confined by fences, the herd at Tomales Point has suffered disease outbreaks, and park officials have resorted to limiting its growth with birth-control drugs.
A largely unanswered question is how reintroduced elk affect plants.
Since elk nearly went extinct, California has been overrun with invasive plant species. Will elk eat those, or avoid them? Will they favor the few remaining native plants and drive those to extinction?
"What's happened is that we've shuffled the deck so much in terms of plant and animal communities that when we do one thing, it may have unintended consequences," said J. Hall Cushman, a biology professor at Sonoma State University.
Cushman in 2007 completed one of the few exhaustive studies on this issue. Focusing on the fenced elk at Tomales Point over a five-year period, he found the effects of elk grazing were very mixed.
It turns out these elk like to eat velvet grass, a problematic invasive plant. The herd also helped keep native grasslands open by eating shrubs. But the animals also caused an overall decrease in seasonal plants and an increase in annuals, which tend to be invasive.
"They have a big effect on the plant community which then ripples throughout the whole ecosystem," Cushman said.
The state will study some of these potential effects before starting its next big reintroduction project, Hobbs said.
(E-mail reporter Matt Weiser at mweiser(at)sacbee.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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