“I remember as a kid going to watch some of the whitetail deer releases that, people before me were doing and being amazed at that,” Garland said. Plans to move elk from western states, with help from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, were already underway. But the on-the-ground reality of working with local communities and the available resources could make the ambitious idea an upward climb.Ī storyboard of Whiteman’s idea, overlapping existing elk herds in Appalachia with mine sites, mountain top removal mining areas, and a buffer zone (in green) for the proposed elk corridor.Ĭhris Garland, an eastern Kentucky native, remembers being fresh from graduating college and starting a job with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources in the 1990s. Across a region that has seen significant losses in coal production and employment, he believes the valued mammals could be a part of the region’s future.Ĭonservation advocates, biologists and wildlife officials who have been on the ground since the beginning of the eastern Kentucky elk restoration see potential in Whiteman’s idea with the benefits to biodiversity and species connectivity a corridor could provide. He argues that creating such an expansive conservation corridor for elk could not only provide habitat for a myriad of species - songbirds, darters and mayflies, to name a few - but it could provide an economic boost to Appalachia through the hunting and tourism and the management of the conserved land. “If we restored some of these wild areas, not only for elk but just for people, we could create some sustainable forestry that would potentially drive that economy, or at least provide some of the jobs that for those coal mining jobs that just aren’t coming back,” Whiteman said. The conservation biology and wildlife professor at Murray State University credits that trip for being a gateway to a larger idea: why not connect public lands and private land through conservation easements to create a corridor across the Appalachian mountains for elk and other species to thrive? Murray State University Professor Howard Whiteman in the Elk and Bison Prairie at the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. Seeing the hoof prints, seeing the bark rubbed off on trees by antlers, and hearing the bugles left an impression on him. Whiteman got to see one of these large mammals up close during a hunting trip in 2014, winning a coveted hunting permit from the state. What started in 1997 as little more than 1,500 elk from the western U.S., released across eastern Kentucky, has become a conservation success story in the eyes of state wildlife officials: the largest elk herd east of the Mississippi River, with an estimated nearly 16,000 elk across 16 eastern Kentucky counties last year. The Tennessee Valley Authority decided to create the Elk and Bison Prairie in the mid-1990s to reintroduce native grasses and native animals back to the region for educational purposes, and on the other side of the state, Kentucky wildlife officials were well on their way to reintroducing elk to eastern Kentucky, too. Native grasses fill the landscape at the Elk and Bison Prairie in western Kentucky. It was more than a century later before efforts would solidify to bring them back to the state.
Whiteman grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania with reminders of how elk used to be treated differently in the region he inherited from his grandfather an old book of game laws from the early 1900s when elk were reintroduced and hunted in the Keystone State.īut in Kentucky, the eastern subspecies of elk native to the state were gone by the end of the 19th century, overhunted and their habitat degraded as the coal industry increasingly made an impact on the land. “Lots of other species are like that, but for such a large animal to do that, it’s pretty amazing.”
“For such a large animal they can disappear so quickly,” he said. The elk were hard to find early that October morning, but that doesn’t surprise the sportsman. He’s slowly making his way around an enclosed 700-acre Elk and Bison Prairie in Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, the only public land in western Kentucky where one can see an elk and hear its distinctive bugle. Howard Whiteman is inching along in his black Toyota Prius, craning his neck to see what’s beyond the rolling grasslands into the nearby woods.
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