HOLDEN, W.Va.– This past year’s reproduction for elk in the southern West Virginia coalfields appears to be the best since the animals were reintroduced in 2016. The Division of Natural Resources” Elk Project Leader Randy Kelley and his team have been hard at work since the first of the year to lay hands on as many of the 2024 calves as possible.
At the time of this report they had captured 18 and were aware of several more. Along the way, they’ve also been able to capture and work up a few they missed from the 2023 calving season.
It was an encouraging development for Kelley because the past year hasn’t been the program’s best.
“We had a good year of captures in 2021, then we had a couple of down years below what we had hoped for. But I have to say this year, calf production in 2024 may best so far, which is good because 2024 is one of the worst we’ve had in terms of brainworm,” Kelley explained in an edition of West Virginia Outdoors.
The brainworm is an active parasite which attacks all cervids, but seems to have a much more dramatic and lethal impact on elk than whitetail deer.
“It was something we expected and we knew it was here. Literature says you can expect between five and ten percent mortality on your population over time. Each year it’s been different. We’ve had as little as four percent loss and this year it jumped up closer to 13-percent. So 2024 was a gruesome year for us,” he explained.
Since the reintroduction in 2016, 74 West Virginia elk have died of one thing or another, 54 of those were confirmed to be a result of brain worm. The second leading cause of death was among the Arizona elk who suffered severe stress and that only claimed six.
Kelley hoped they could continue to power through the inflection point of where brainworm had such a dramatic impact on the overall population. According to Kelley, neighboring Kentucky has its issues with brainworm too, but because they started out with 1500 animals and have a massive heard now they were past the infection point even before their program started.
Kelley and his team place GPS tracking collars on the calves or replace them on others when they have gone bad or need to be switched. They’ve also pulled DNA samples on every elk ever released. They try to get a sample from each calf born on the Tomblin WMA.
When the Elk Reintroduction Program began the plan called for importing many more elk each year from the western United States and possibly from neighboring Kentucky. However, the landscape of wildlife disease has changed dramatically in the time frame. Kelley worried without some advancement in science, the days of transporting even modest numbers of elk into the state may be over.
“I think it will depend on the development of a live animal test for CWD. If we could round up some elk in a willing western state and take a blood test to prove they do not have CWD, then maybe we could move some additional elk. But you don’t want to take that chance without a positive way to protect the herd. We wouldn’t want to transfer CWD to our herd and also impact the local deer herd. Sans the development of a live test for CWD I wouldn’t expect any wholesale transfers, ” he explained.