Bringing Back the Elk

Elk once roamed all across the southern Appalachians, but by the mid eighteen hundreds relentless hunting and vanishing habitat had wiped them out of these mountains entirely. For a century and a half, no wild elk walked the Smokies. Then, in two thousand one, the National Park Service set out to change that.

Wildlife managers released twenty-five elk into the remote Cataloochee Valley on the North Carolina side of the park, animals brought in from the Land Between the Lakes region. The next year they added twenty-seven more, this batch from Elk Island National Park in Alberta, Canada, bringing the founding herd to roughly fifty-two. The early years were rough.

Black bears preyed heavily on the newborn calves, and biologists worried the whole experiment might fail. But the elk learned. New generations grew wiser about bears, more calves survived, and the herd took hold.

Today that founding group has grown to somewhere around two hundred fifty animals, and in autumn the meadows of Cataloochee fill with the eerie, high pitched bugling of bull elk competing for mates, one of the great wildlife spectacles of the East. It stands as one of the park's proudest conservation victories, a native animal restored to mountains it had not seen in living memory, and a reminder that some losses can be undone.