Walking a mile in an elk's shoes ... er

November 18, 2016

Elk getting a first-class ride to the landing zone.

By Casey McCormack IDFG Wildlife Technician For the past several years Idaho Department of Fish and Game has been working on a project to get to know our elk a bit better. Efforts and methods to monitor elk populations have always been a high priority for IDFG but recently new technology has given us an opportunity to walk a mile in our elk’s “shoes”… ermm … I mean “hooves,” like we never have before. The tools that give us the opportunity do this are VHF radio telemetry and GPS wildlife collars. VHF (very high frequency) telemetry collars have been around for quite some time and are still used today. These collars emit a signal at a specific frequency that allows us to get an approximate location and check to see if an animal is alive or dead. In 2011 and 2013 a total of 39 elk were collared with VHF collars around Calder and Avery. While VHF collars can be useful for determining survival rates, it requires someone to be in close proximity on the ground or in the air to check on collared animals. More recently, wildlife collars have improved drastically and now use GPS technology. This allows biologists to place a GPS collar on an animal, set it, and forget it… well, kind of. Since 2014, 83 cows and 113 calves have been captured and fitted with GPS collars in Game Management Units 3, 4, 6, 7 and 9. Bulls are not collared and any male calves collared are fitted with a collar designed to expand and break off after about 6 months as the animal grows. In order to efficiently capture and collar elk, helicopters must be used. This involves using tranquilizer darts or nets from the air. Those animals are processed on site or loaded into a sling below the helicopter and brought to a landing zone to be processed. Elk being processed and fitted with collar. During processing, blood and fecal samples are taken to check for disease and/or pregnancy. Age is estimated by looking at the animal’s teeth and a measure of body condition is taken. Once the animals have been measured and fitted with a GPS collar, the helicopter takes it back home. After the animal is released these GPS collars are able to record and send exact locations of each animal on a daily basis. This gives us up to date and detailed information regarding habitat use and movement for up to three or four years With this information we will be able to see how large of an area individual’s use, what habitat is preferred during different times of the year and will hopefully give us an understanding of important habitat while calving. Having a collar send us information daily also gives us detailed survival rates and the opportunity to accurately determine the cause of death for each animal. When a collar remains still for eight hours it sends a mortality signal notifying us that the animal has not moved and may be dead. When we receive these signals we respond as quickly as possible, usually within a day. While sometimes we simply find a collar that has broken and fallen off a young male, often we find a kill site. Getting to the kill site within 24 hours allows us the valuable opportunity to see exactly what happened and who or what the likely culprit was. Stay tuned for results from the mortality investigations soon.