Photo by Bill Lea

Bryce came back from his archery elk hunt with so many stories I almost did not believe him. It didn’t take much persuading to get me to put in for an elk permit, and the next year I, too, had a tag to pursue bull elk with a bow in unit 5A in Arizona.

WIt was a warm September evening and the light was getting dim as Taylor and I made our way up the mountain to check for elk grazing on the ridgetops. Taylor knew where the elk would be, and when we got to a certain point his posture changed. He went from a relaxed walk to a tense quiet, and I swear I could see the hair rising on his neck. He took on that universal 6-inch hunker as he walked, where you hunch over 6 inches and walk on the sides of your feet, instinctively feeling it makes you silent and invisible.

We rounded the hill, and Taylor pointed at a 5x5 bull grazing about 400 yards below. The bull was oblivious to us. A half-mile away, we could make out the silhouettes of about 25 elk coming out of the timber and spreading out across a ridgetop meadow. The herd of cows and calves zeroed in on us almost immediately. After a two-minute standoff, they disappeared back into the timber. This scenario could have happened in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico or any other western state. But we were in southeastern Kentucky!

Taylor Orr is an Elk Foundation chapter chair in London, Kentucky, and his father used to own the land where we stood that September day. The property is now part of the Begley Wildlife Management Area and is owned by Begley Lumber Company. The grassy ridgetops are reclaimed coal mines, and here in southeastern Kentucky they are considered great elk habitat. After a 160-year absence, elk once again roam the valleys, hills and hollers of Daniel Boone country. My job is to make sure the elk and other wildlife restored here never disappear again.

I am the director of the Elk Foundation’s Appalachians Wildlife Initiative. Our goal is to protect and restore elk country in the southern Appalachian Mountains. We’re achieving it by building partnerships with government agencies, conservation groups, landowners, hunters, and the mining, timber, agriculture and tourism industries. We embrace the traditional land uses that have shaped the character of this region for centuries. Underneath the umbrella of the initiative roam three restored elk herds—in Kentucky’s eastern coal fields, Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains and North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Having grown up in east Tennessee, within a three-hour drive of almost every elk in the initiative’s boundaries, this is a very personal task for me. I am a lucky person by any measure. Not only have I been married for 20 years to the best, most beautiful woman in the world and have five outstanding kids, but my vocation is directly linked to my avocations—hunting and conserving habitat for the wildlife that is so much a part of my soul.

First, Some History

Three hundred years ago, the southern Appalachians were a land of rolling hills, big blue mountains, deep woods, ridgetop balds, oak savannahs, fog-filled valleys, chestnut forests, vast canebrakes and clear streams. Elk, bison and white-tailed deer roamed the region. Otters, wild turkeys, cougars, bears, wolves, red-cockaded woodpeckers and passenger pigeons called the area home.

But all that began to change in the 1700s, when white settlers were first drawn to this bounty. It took an appallingly short time for the guns and traps of market hunters to deplete this fabulous abundance. Settlers replaced forests and canebrakes with crops and cut trees for cabins, fences and firewood. They hunted for meat and hides to feed and clothe themselves and killed off as many predators as they could. Bison vanished from the region by 1800, and 50 years later elk did the same. Deer and turkeys were gone by 1900.

A century later, hunters stepped up to help state wildlife agencies restore some of these lost wildlife populations. The list of species restored in the past 50 years includes white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, black bears, bald eagles, river otters, beavers and peregrine falcons. One of the most unlikely and most celebrated wildlife restoration stories in the past decade has been the return of elk. On December 17, 1997, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources and the Elk Foundation released seven wild elk onto reclaimed coal mining lands on the Addington Enterprises Wildlife Management Area in southeastern Kentucky. More than 3,500 people—including hundreds of schoolchildren—watched as elk made tracks in Kentucky soil for the first time in seven generations. After that first release, the state released another 1,500 elk at eight different sites over the next five years. As of the end of 2004, there are about 4,400 wild elk in eastern Kentucky, and based on population data collected by the department of fish and wildlife resources the herd appears to be growing 15 percent annually. We are fast approaching the overall population goal of 8,000 elk. Hunters could be killing as many as 1,500 elk per year within five years.

The success of the Kentucky elk restoration has caught the interest of other states in the southern Appalachians. Tennessee released 167 elk on the Cumberland Plateau beginning in December 2000. Unfortunately, not long after that, chronic wasting disease appeared for the first time east of the Mississippi in Wisconsin, which put the skids on all interstate transport of live wild elk, slowing Tennessee’s efforts. The experimental elk population in Great Smoky Mountains National Park now stands at about 60 animals.

It probably does not surprise anyone that elk have no respect for state sovereignty. As I write this, Kentucky elk are grazing in Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and have been documented roaming in North Carolina and Ohio. The future of elk in all of these states depends on the success of our efforts in Kentucky, Tennessee and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Virginia and West Virginia have not committed to restoring elk yet, but the Elk Foundation is paying for a feasibility study in West Virginia and helped fund a similar study several years ago in Virginia.

Now that elk are back in the Appalachians, the Elk Foundation is mobilizing a conservation effort that will apply all of the tools we have used in the West to make sure elk and other wildlife never again disappear from North America’s oldest mountains. The same forces that impact elk and other wildlife in other places are here in the mountains of Dixie, including habitat loss and fragmentation to subdivision and other development, habitat quality issues, herd population dynamics and public acceptance. The foundation’s ultimate goal is to secure forever a series of core habitats linked together by viable travel corridors in the southern Appalachians. In our vision, these habitats will be brimming with robust elk populations that can be hunted and enjoyed for generations to come.

Conservation targets

The key to reaching this goal lies in understanding what makes Appalachian elk country tick.

Elk and other wildlife: By no means is this initiative strictly about elk. The Elk Foundation’s efforts benefit all the wild critters roaming elk habitat, including white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, ruffed grouse, bobwhite quail, golden-winged warblers and cerulean warblers (both of which are in trouble), to name just a few.

Grassland habitats: Much of the elk habitat in this country is grasslands created by surface mining. Some areas are long, narrow contour mines that, when reclaimed, create a strip of grassland about 200 yards wide along the side of a ridge. Other sites involve mountaintop removal mining—which forever removes the crown of a mountain—as well as other mountaintop mining techniques that return the mountain to its approximate original contour. These sites can cover hundreds or even thousands of acres and, when reclaimed with a mixture of desirable grasses, forbs, shrubs and trees, create high-quality wildlife habitat.

Forest habitats: The dense hardwood forests of Kentucky and Tennessee harbor more than 100 tree species that average 60 to 90 years old. But their value to wildlife is limited by their composition and structure. For much of the last 200 years, logging practices involved “high-grading,” a form of selective harvest that takes most of the high-quality, desirable trees like oak and black cherry and leaves the poorly formed, low-grade trees like red maple, sweetgum and hemlock to grow into a new forest. These trees typically do not produce much food for wildlife. Often, clearcutting or aggressive timber harvesting is needed to remedy this situation.

In addition, a closed tree canopy blocks out all sunlight from the forest floor, leaving little for elk and deer to eat and scant cover for ground-nesting songbirds, ruffed grouse and wild turkeys. When trees die in an old-growth eastern hardwood forest, they create natural gaps in the canopy, allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor and sprout new vegetation. Rather than waiting 250 years for an old growth forest to form, wildlife managers can mimic an old-growth forest structure and natural disturbances through selective logging and prescribed burning.

Habitat fragmentation and loss: About 95 percent of the land in the 16-county Kentucky elk restoration zone is privately owned. One day it will be threatened by subdivision and other development. We must move now to protect this wild country forever before it is too late.

Public access: Hunting, hiking, elk-viewing and other forms of outdoor recreation are crucial to the future economic well-being of eastern Kentucky. Coalfields are the last vast expanses of undeveloped country left here, yet there are limited opportunities for the public to enjoy this incredible resource. Currently there is not one place in eastern Kentucky open to the general public where I can send somebody to see elk. Access to these lands is very limited because of safety issues with respect to the mines and mining activities.

Coal, land and wildlife

Kentucky is the third largest coal producing state in the country, with Wyoming and West Virginia holding the top spots, respectively. Surface mining for coal has a dramatic impact on the landscape and on the wildlife that live there, and some people are adamantly opposed to it. Yet the coal industry is largely responsible for keeping eastern Kentucky undeveloped. The companies that mine coal have kept huge tracts of land intact that would have otherwise been sold and subdivided. The fact is, until we develop an alternative form of energy, the demand for coal will continue to increase and more mining will occur. As a wildlife conservationist, I have to admit that an active coal mine looks like the wrath of God. But I also believe that using responsible techniques can minimize the negative impacts of mining and maximize the benefits of reclamation. The Elk Foundation is committed to working with the coal industry and other partners to improve the situation and capture some real conservation opportunities.

In 1977, the Surface Mine Reclamation and Conservation Act became law, setting federal standards for coal mining and mine reclamation. It also allowed mining states to set standards that fit their local situations, thus giving the states “primacy” over their mining industries. Under the Act, a mining company must choose a “post-mining land use” for a site, which determines how it will be reclaimed and what will be planted there. Categories include hayland/pastureland, commercial forest, fish and wildlife, residential/commercial and industrial. The first three can provide some wildlife benefit if done properly. The other two obviously favor development. Eastern Kentucky’s landscape has been described as 6-foot-wide ridgetops and 12-foot-wide valleys, with everything in between straight up and down. While this is an exaggeration, it isn’t all that far off the mark. Because of this rugged terrain, significant parts of some eastern Kentucky towns are built on old coal mines, which oftentimes are the only pieces of flat ground around.

From the late 1970s through much of the ’90s, mine reclamation consisted of grading and compacting the site until the soil was as hard as concrete, then seeding the area with Kentucky 31 fescue and Serecea lespedeza to provide a layer of vegetation. Over the past 28 years, 300,000 to 400,000 acres in Kentucky have been reclaimed in this manner.

While these plants are great at controlling erosion, they are nearly useless for wildlife. Serecea lespedeza has a little redeeming value in that it can provide good security cover for rabbits and quail. Many years ago, agriculture researchers thought that Kentucky 31 fescue and Serecea lespedeza were two miracle forages that would hold the world together and be boons to agriculture. Over time, they have been proven to be undesirable for cattle and horse grazing and to be as noxious and undesirable for wildlife as kudzu and knapweed. In 1995, Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, Kentucky Division of Forestry and Kentucky Department of Surface Mining set new state standards for mine reclamation for wildlife, creating a list of plant species that excludes Kentucky 31 and Serecea. While this is an improvement, the guidelines for providing and managing wildlife habitat are very general. For example, if I want to create habitat for quail and songbirds, I might do something very different than if I want to create habitat for deer. While the guidelines list dozens of grass, forb, shrub and tree species that provide a lot of flexibility, there is no guidance on what to plant and where to plant it. It would be like handing somebody a dictionary and then expecting them to write a best-selling novel just because they had a list of words. This is one of the first things the Elk Foundation and our partners are addressing under the Appalachians Initiative.

The foundation, department of fish and wildlife resources, Kentucky Department of Natural Resources and federal Office of Surface Mining are currently reviewing and revising wildlife habitat guidelines. We aim to create guidelines that will allow site preparation that does not compact the soil into a concrete-like layer and plant vegetation that provides the most nutritious forage and sufficient cover for wildlife. When we finish this process, these new guidelines will create habitat good for elk, deer, turkeys, quail, songbirds, ruffed grouse, rabbits and almost every other living thing in this part of the world.

The Elk Foundation and its partners are also working on creating a series of incentives to motivate mining companies to reclaim coal mines for wildlife using specific habitat prescriptions written by wildlife habitat managers. The incentives might be related to bond issues or financial assistance in the reclamation process, but our goal is to have every surface mine in the future reclaimed in a manner that creates high-quality habitat for elk and other wildlife.

“This effort will change the face of the east Kentucky landscape,” says Jon Gassett, director of wildlife for the department of fish and wildlife resources. “By encouraging private landowners to provide elk habitat and offering incentives to provide public access, we hope to establish a model that is unlike any other in North America.”

Kentucky’s commerce secretary Jim Host, who is a member of Governor Ernie Fletcher’s cabinet, is heading up an effort to create the state’s first-ever Commonwealth Energy Policy. Host and the cabinet have regularly solicited the foundation and its partners for input into developing this energy plan. We hope they will incorporate our vision for wildlife conservation and coal mine reclamation into the final plan. Once accomplished, the effects could ripple across hundreds of thousands of acres and benefit wildlife populations for generations to come.

When it comes to Kentucky’s coalfields, our efforts don’t stop with mine reclamation. What will it take for a company or private landowner to permanently protect mine land from subdivision and other development but still allow deep mining and timber harvest? What will it take for a land company to grant long-term access to the public for hunting or other recreation? What will it take for a landowner to donate the surface rights to a piece of land to the Elk Foundation or a state agency as a wildlife management area? These are the questions the foundation and its partners are asking and the solutions we are seeking. It might be tough to get this done, and it will take time, but once we achieve success, the effects on the landscape will be huge and leave a true conservation legacy.

The Daniel Boone National Forest

The U.S. Forest Service has been the Elk Foundation’s most significant partner throughout our 20-year history. Over the past two decades, the Forest Service and the foundation have completed more than 1,700 land protection and habitat enhancement projects on more than 1.7 million acres all across the country. As partners, they have funneled nearly $90 million into wildlife conservation projects, the bulk of which have been in the West. The Appalachians Wildlife Initiative gives us an opportunity to expand our tremendous partnership with the Forest Service by working with the Daniel Boone National Forest.

The Daniel Boone makes up a significant portion of the Kentucky elk zone and at 700,000 acres is the biggest block of public land in the state. One of the initial elk releases occurred on the Daniel Boone in the Redbird Wildlife Management Area. Our focus now is to improve habitat for elk and other wildlife on the forest and to help the Forest Service acquire private inholdings within the forest boundary. Habitat projects could include prescribed fires and selective timber harvest to restore oak savannahs and native grasslands.

“People don’t think of the East as having fire-related ecosystems, but studies show that historically fire was present,” says Daniel Boone National Forest supervisor Ben Worthington. “Too much biomass is a problem here, just like in the West. But instead of having catastrophic fire, we have catastrophic insect and disease problems. Partnerships with the foundation and others will help us do cutting and prescribed fire projects that will battle these invasive pests, improve the health of the forest and provide better habitat for elk and other wildlife.”

Partnering with the Daniel Boone on land acquisitions will help the foundation protect habitat and create more opportunities for public access. The biggest challenge will be to secure federal Land and Water Conservation Funds for these acquisitions. These funds are limited and highly sought after. Some people are opposed to adding any more federal lands. However, if the alternative is to turn the country where generations of people have explored, hunted and fished into residential and commercial real estate, opinions could be swayed. If the Forest Service owns it, elk and other wildlife and the public will have wild country to roam.

2030 Vision

Imagine this: It is the year 2030. There are now 40,000 wild elk in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, and 20,000 Elk Foundation members in each of these states. Throughout the southern Appalachians, the foundation and its partners have restored more than 1 million acres of elk habitat and permanently protected another 750,000 acres. Populations of deer, turkeys, ruffed grouse and many songbird species are thriving because of our work, and trout and smallmouth bass populations are increasing in the creeks and rivers. Through incentives for private landowners, all coalmines are reclaimed with the intent of creating and restoring wildlife habitat, and the partnership model we have pioneered with the coal industry sets the standard for future conservation efforts.

I call this my “2030 Vision” for two reasons. For one, it will probably take that long to achieve it. Secondly, it is an imperfect vision. There will be bumps and obstacles to overcome. However, as my kids grow up hunting and fishing the hollers and ridges of Kentucky and Tennessee, creating their own memories, we all must strive to conserve this wonderful country. If we achieve this 2030 vision, my grandkids—and yours—will hunt those same hollers and ridges. They might even elk hunt.