Elk Video from California
Elk
My daughter sent me this video she took this morning near the beach at Point Reyes National Seashore by the cliff at North Beach. She says it is only a half hour outside San Francisco. Never would have thought of that as elk territory.
Can’t get the video to post but here is a screen shot.
Here it is on YouTube. Thanks
The elk have been spreading south through Mendocino. I think that 20 years from now, there's going to be a ton of elk between San Fran and highway 36. Their numbers and range are just going up and there's a lot of land out there.
I saw them everywhere I went in B6 - huge bulls too. They need to start giving out more tags.
The Point Reyes elk are not a result of southern spread, just an isolated reintroduction.
CA elk numbers are increasing dramatically, and unfortunately that is causing Roosevelt (largest elk) and Tule elk (smallest elk) to cross over into one another's habitat in Mendocino County. Per friends who live up there, it is pretty obvious when you get one in with the other.
The big issue in CA in terms of more tags is most elk are on private and DFW apparently has a methodology where they will not offer more private tags unless they can issue more public. This creates a problem for the property owners with elk. We have counted 40+ bulls and 80+ cows/calves in one day on a local ranch and they get 2 bull tags and 2 cow tags/year. That is not nearly enough for them to keep the herd in check.
The B6 elk I saw were definitely Rooseys. Huge bodies and big crowns. I guess their antlers can look a lot alike, but there's no mistaking a full-size Tule from a full-size Roosey.
There is a lot of public land between San Fran and Eureka, but unfortunately, most of the elk are on the private in that area. I think it's only a matter of time before they start spreading into the bigger public areas. There just is not enough hunting+predator pressure to keep the numbers down.
Used to go over there often. Bulls usually hang out within the first mile of the enclosure and cows and calves out towards the point. If that guy is outside the enclosure there’s a good chance he will be shot. There used to be a healthy population of fallow deer all around the area. But they were exterminated because they were a non native species. There were three out there on a dairy I would see that had enormous antlers. All gone. I asked a park worker out there why. Besides being non native he said they carried a lot of parasites that would infect his horses. I just shut up at that point. They also pick up shed antlers and run them through a chipper so no one will pick them up.
