‘Quite a quest’
Local environmental scientist helps confirm Sonora Pass bull elk
Before Europeans came to North America, as many as 10 million elk roamed the continent, including about 500,000 in what is today the Golden State. Gold Rush hunters decimated the herds, and elk approached extinction in California in the 19th century. Much larger than deer, elk are among the biggest mammals in North America. Their natural range did not used to include the west Central Sierra, including the Stanislaus River and Tuolumne River watersheds.
But a lone bull elk, confirmed by DNA from fecal matter, did make its way to the Sonora Pass area just last year. A Tuolumne County-based environmental scientist helped gather the evidence.
“We got a couple reports from deer hunters,” Mark
Abraham with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said last Saturday in an interview outside Sierra Village. “One text messaged a picture. One guy, his phone died so he couldn’t take a photo.”
The hunters provided location reports on the bull elk, which was spotted near St. Mary’s Pass, just north of Highway 108 and Sonora Pass in Alpine County, near the Carson-iceberg Wilderness boundary.
“One hunter saw the rack at first light and thought it was a big buck,” Abraham said. “Then he heard it bugle.”
Those who have heard an elk bugle in the fall rut season say it’s hard to describe. Tom Reed, a Wyoming-based outdoors writer, says it’s “thrilling and haunting.” It starts out “low and throaty, rising to a high whistle, then dropping to a grunt or a series of grunts,” Reed wrote for www.yellowstonepark. com two years ago. Reed also said it sounds like “a guttural bellow, a shrill pitch, and a hollow grunting.”
Abraham, who has been walking, hunting, and working in the Stanislaus National Forest his whole life, went to St. Mary’s Pass and found and collected the bull elk’s fecal matter in October 2019.
Abraham and other Fish and Wildlife scientists aren’t sure if the lone bull elk was traveling alone, or with other elk. The lone bull elk was not tagged, but it’s believed to be a Rocky Mountain elk first spotted in September 2019 south of Lake Tahoe.
“For me it means there’s a lot we’re not aware of with wildlife,” Abraham said Saturday. “We need to study it further.”
Tim Cooper, a resident of Stockton who’s been coming to Sonora Pass and the Stanislaus National Forest to hunt deer and bear for decades, said last Saturday at the Mi-wuk General Store the biggest deer he ever shot was near St. Mary’s Pass, between Sonora Peak and Stanislaus Peak.
But he’s never heard of an elk of any kind up around Sonora Pass.
Adult mule deer bucks in California average around 200 pounds, can grow to 330 pounds, and stand up to 3 feet, 6 inches at the shoulder. A mature Rocky Mountain bull elk can be 700 to 1,000 pounds and stand 5 feet or taller at the shoulder.
“In the Sierra Nevada, this is a rarity,” Kristin Denryter, coordinator of the state Fish and Wildlife elk and pronghorn antelope program, said last week in a phone interview. “There are some bull elk on the east side of the Sierra in the Owens Valley area, in the Tinemaha Mountain hunt zone and the West Tinemaha hunt zone.”
The Sonora Pass bull elk was confirmed through fecal DNA at the Crystal Basin recreation area south of Lake Tahoe in September 2019, and then at St. Mary’s Pass in the Sonora Pass area about six weeks later, Denryter said.
Hunting elk is legal in California, Denryter said, but you have to have a hunting license and an elk tag. There is no elk hunt zone in the Sonora Pass area, so it would be illegal to try to take an elk in the Stanislaus National Forest or the Sonora Pass.
Nathan Graveline, a Fish and Wildlife biologist who used to be based in the Mother Lode, is now a wildlife management supervisor based in Fresno. About a dozen years ago, he heard rumors about a sole elk spotted between the Clavey and Tuolumne rivers in the Stanislaus National Forest, according to a Fish and Wildlife article, “Following the Unusual Migration of a Trailblazing Elk,” posted in June 2020.
Back in the mid to late 2000s, scientists didn’t have technology to confirm the reports.
“Nobody knew where the elk came from,” Graveline said in the article. “We weren’t able to piece any of that together.”
Then, the equally unexpected sighting of the lone bull elk south of Lake Tahoe happened last year. Graveline heard about it and thought it was important that local scientists jump on the opportunity and try for a good DNA sample to try to determine where the elk came from.
They set up trail cameras and got a decent photo of the elk. They also collected scat samples, which they sent to Benjamin Sacks, director of the mammalian ecology and conservation unit at the University of California, Davis veterinary genetics lab.
Sacks and graduate student Taylor Davis did DNA analysis on the scat samples and determined the lone bull elk probably originated from a herd in the northeastern part of the state.
The report of an elk near Lake Tahoe was unusual by itself, but sightings six weeks later of another lone bull elk near Sonora Pass was even more noteworthy. That’s when Abraham investigated hunters’ reports and collected the fecal matter at St. Mary’s Pass. Those samples were also sent to Sacks.
Genotyping and DNA analysis showed the Sonora Pass bull elk “was the exact same elk that was tracked south of Lake Tahoe,” Tom Batter, a doctoral degree candidate in Sacks’ lab, told state Fish and Wildlife.
Fish and Wildlife scientists and researchers called the lone bull elk a trailblazer, a Rocky Mountain elk that traveled 40 miles in six weeks and ended up farther south in the Central Sierra than had previously been reported.
“That boy was on quite a quest,” said Shelly Blair, a state Fish and Wildlife biologist in El Dorado County. “He likely traveled over some pretty rocky terrain, depending on which route he took. He probably had to cross over Interstate 80 or the 395 corridor at some point. Without the DNA, it would have been a total mystery as to where the elk came from.”
Denryter said the bull’s journey is likely evidence of population growth among elk or herd densities that exceed the carrying capacity of the habitat.
“We know there’s great potential for expansion by bulls, and this means there could be recolonizations happening,” Denryter said. “We want our elk to be expanding and figuring out new habitats and going to new places. A bull elk like this might be figuring out new migratory routes and allowing for migration to persist. If he’s taking this route, then other elk and wildlife could be doing the same in the future.”
Today the state Fish and Wildlife Department estimates there are more than 12,000 elk in California, including 5,700 Roosevelt elk in the northwest counties closest to Oregon; 5,700 tule elk in the Diablo Range in the East Bay area, Point Reyes
National Seashore north of San Francisco, Carrizo Plain in southeastern San Luis Obispo County, and the Owens Valley from Lone Pine to Bishop; and 1,500 Rocky Mountain elk in northeastern California.
“We really like the public to share their reports,” Denryter told The Union Democrat. “We do have an online tool for reporting elk sightings. They can share
photos and locations to help us track elk. Throughout the state, our elk populations are increasing, and public input helps us make better estimates of how their distribution is changing.”