Chasing the Rut: North American Elk

Of all the North American species that enter the rut each year, no other comes close to elk for pure excitement. Once you have experienced it, once you have witnessed it in all its testosterone fueled glory, don’t be surprised if you find yourself completely hooked. Many call it an addiction. And after spending a month one fall chasing the elk rut some 1400 miles from Colorado to Alberta, Canada, I am in complete agreement.

It starts with the bugle. That ghostly sound that echoes across canyons, through forests, and over mountains before sunrise means many things to an elk. For the ladies, it’s a love song, the depth and length and strength of a bugle representing the strength of the bull from which it emanates. The cows, it would seem, can’t resist the right bugle. As that sound begins to reverberate through the landscape each September, the girls become hypnotized by it. They find it intoxicating and are drawn in from miles around. And if a stronger bull calls out nearby, the cows will slowly slip away, one by one, gathering about the superior song and genetics.

Then there are the bulls themselves. Here we find the double-edged sword of it all as the bugle proves to be both a love song and a war cry. Sex and violence. A bull bugles to announce himself to the world, to call attention to himself, do dare would be challengers to a duel. A bull who has wooed a harem of cows would do well to try and secret the ladies to himself, slipping off into the forest of lodgepole pines and Douglas firs to ensure his lineage. But then that bull would not be an elk if he did so.

Instead, the bull is a like a berserker of Viking fame. So drunk are they are on their own testosterone, so sure of themselves, that the bugle is issued forth like a war cry daring all others to come and challenge him for the right to breed. Spend a day with one of these berserkers at the peak of the rut and you will witness a steady stream of would-be contenders taking him up on the challenge. With each fight, he insures the loyalty of his cows. With each fight he risks injury, disfigurement, and death. But still he calls out. And one by one, the challengers arrive for a chance to best the king and claim his harem.

A bull elk at the peak of the rut paws at the ground, digging up grass or sagebrush, creating a wallow. Once satisfied, he will begin to urinate on the spot. Impossible amounts of urine usher forth, saturating the ground. Not satisfied, the bull then dips his head down, between his front legs and proceeds to urinate all over his own neck and face. This is the reason for the denser fur on the bull’s neck. It collects the pheromones, bathing him in something that apparently only a cow elk can love.

Once empty, the bull lays down in the wallow of piss and dirt and begins to roll and cover himself further with the scent of the rut. Now, fully intoxicated, he leaps to his feet, and charges the nearest tree, or sagebrush, of wildlife photographer. Each antler can weigh between 50 – 80lbs on this head. And he uses these to thrash and shred anything nearby which he dons as proof of his superiority.

Imagine all of this with a beast that can weigh in at 1,500lbs across the northern reaches of its species, and stands 6 feet tall at the shoulders. Next, throw in a set of antlers that can measure 4 feet high and 5 feet wide. Now, you might understand why this species becomes the object of so many photographers’ obsession come autumn.

Photographers be warned, however. This is a dangerous time of the year to photograph bull elk. Bulls attack cars that stop too close, stabbing antlers through windshields and aluminum car bodies. A few years ago, while scouting for our workshop, my co-leader in Alberta that year was charged by a monster of a bull. He dove through a buck and rail fence, only for the elk to smash his head and antlers into the log beams of that fence a mere second later. Satisfied with his victory over this photographer, the bull turned, raised his head, and bugled into the crisp mountain air with triumph before trotting off to his cows – something that always conjures up the scene from Jurassic Park where the Tyrannosaurus roars out as he vanquishes the velociraptors at the end of the movie.

This can be heart stopping photography, the type of experience to get your adrenaline going and sending you diving for cover.

When bull elk enter the rut, they stop eating. For nearly a month they live off the accumulated fat from the summer. All attention is directed toward carrying on their blood line. They fight. They mate. They fret. They fight some more. And through all of this, they sustain wounds, and lose weight, and slowly starve themselves – right before the first snows of winter begin to fall.

If you have ever spent time around any of the species that I detail in this series, Chasing the Rut, then you will notice that there tends to be something of a discrepancy in the ratio of males to females. At birth, all is equal with males and females being born at a 50 : 50 ratio. But once we reach maturity, once we reach breeding age adults, that ratio skews to 70 : 30 across the population. That’s 70% female to 30% male. You have the brutality of the rut to thank for this. Throughout the tournaments, while the bulls begin to starve, and sustain what are often mortal wounds, the inevitability of the next season closes in. Winter is coming. And when it does, the males of these species begin the hardest time of the year at a deficit. Whereas the females spend the rutting season fattening up for winter, bull elk will lose up to 200lbs over a four-week period of time. And when the snow falls and the cold settles in, they die in droves from sustained wounds and starvation.

This is why most of the photographs you have seen of wolves on an elk kill in the winter are of bulls instead of cows.

When it comes to photographing bull elk in the rut, I think very little of capturing the actual fights. There are some things that still photographs do well, and others that are better suited for moving pictures. Two large bull elk locked in battle happens to be one of those things that stills just can never seem to capture the power of.

Instead, I am searching for behavior, for bugles, for branches hanging from antlers, and postures you simply cannot find from these creatures any other time of the year. There is so much more to photographing these animals during the rut than fights. This is the time of the year they are in their physical prime, when they are distracted, and make for the best models. And a bugling elk set to a gorgeous backdrop outsells battling elk all day long.

Unlike bison and pronghorn, elk can be found in both the east and the west and were once found up to the edge of the coastal plain along the eastern seaboard. By the early 1900s, however, elk had been driven to extinction in the east.

The elk that eked out a living east of the Mississippi were considered a unique subspecies of elk. Today, however, those individuals living in places like Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina are all a different sub-species, the Rocky Mountain elk, and were introduced here to help bring back the species as a whole to their once rightful place in the east.

In the days of Teddy Roosevelt, there were several different subspecies of elk across North America. There was the Eastern elk (east of the Mississippi), Manitoba elk (Midwest), the Rocky Mountain elk, Merriam’s elk (Southwest), the Thule elk (California), and the Roosevelt elk (Olympic Peninsula of Washington state). Of these, the Eastern and Merriam’s is now extinct.

The whole concept of subspecies in elk is somewhat debatable – as it is in moose as well. There are two camps in the world of taxonomists – those people whose job it is to classify animals: the lumpers and splitters.

Lumpers argue that most of what we would refer to as a subspecies is really just an animal living up to its full genetic potential thanks to the conditions that it survives in. Elk on the Olympic Peninsula, they argue, are larger than elk elsewhere in the lower 48 because the diet is better suited for growing bigger elk. Likewise, Rocky Mountain elk grow the largest antlers not because they are a different subspecies but because they have better access to the minerals necessary for growing antlers than other populations of elk.

Splitters, on the other hand, are just the opposite. Anytime a population of a species is seen to look or behave differently than another, their isolation from each other is assumed to have led to a new subspecies.

Lumpers vs. splitters. This is an argument that is more than 100 years old. And it is one that quite literally landed at the front door of the White House at one point.

C. Hart Merriam was once considered to be the foremost biologist in America. He was a splitter. He marched around North America finding new subspecies behind every tree. At one point he argued that there may be as many as 30 different subspecies of mountain lions in America based upon size, coloration, thickness of fur, and other traits that he saw. All the subspecies of elk and moose that we still discuss today can be attributed to Merriam.

Teddy Roosevelt, on the other hand, was a lumper. Despite his position in politics, Roosevelt was also respected as one of the leading naturalists in the country as well – having written numerous books and countless articles pertaining to the natural history of species. As such, he took time out from his politicking to openly debate Merriam in public forums over their differences in evolutionary opinions. Roosevelt argued that elk were bigger in some locations simply because they had more to eat. Merriam’s rebuttal was based on phenotypical differences (physical differences) and genetic isolation. In the end, Roosevelt was Roosevelt and popular opinion was certainly swayed in his favor. However, the argument was never settled in biology and continues today.

But before Merriam would let it all go and concede to the powerful personality of Roosevelt, he decided to name one of his subspecies of elk after Teddy – the Roosevelt Elk of the Olympic Peninsula. Roosevelt was flattered but saw it all for what it was: a left handed compliment.

Despite this famous exchange of ideas that spanned several years, the debate still rages on in the halls of academia.

Locations. . .

East Coast

Cataloochee Valley – Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Cataloochee Valley can never be mistaken for being on the beaten path around the Smokies. This is the proverbial “you can’t get there from here,” sort of place. Accessed from a long and steep and narrow dirt road that some would say carries with it a certain degree of pucker factor, Cataloochee is the most remote part of the park that you can drive to. But if you live on the east coast and want to photograph the elk rut, there is probably no better place.

Though the climate and seasons are technically quite different between North Carolina and Montana, this doesn’t change the fact that the elk rut in the Smoky Mountains still coincides with the rut in the Rocky Mountains. Thus, the third week of September tends to be the peak of the activity here.

West Coast

Rocky Mountain National Park. This is the premier elk photography destinations in the United States. PERIOD. For the lower 48 states, there is no better place for photographing the rut in my opinion. The chief location is Moraine Park (park as in open meadow). However, the whole place is crawling with elk and the action is not limited to Moraine Park by any measure.

The only catch here is that this Rocky Mountain National Park can still be quite warm during the peak of the rut. This limits your photographic opportunities to a very small window of time – first thing in the morning and MAYBE dusk. During these hot spells, the elk will likely retire to the forest as soon as direct sunlight hits the valley. But if you can catch the rut during cooler weather (think early October) then you will be hard pressed to find a better place to fill cards with monster elk in the US.

Don’t let the forest deter you. Some of the most unique photography happens within the ponderosa pine forest. Remember, elk in a meadow can be a bit cliché.

Grand Tetons National Park.

When I say Grand Tetons National Park, really, I mean Jackson Hole in general. This is my second favorite place in the US for the elk rut. The valley is home to the National Elk Refuge and hosts a population of elk that reach up to 14,000. The only problem though, is that these numbers are only seen in the dead of winter. Though the mountains surrounding the valley are filled to the brim with elk, you are generally limited to finding and photographing only a very small portion of this population that lives west of the Snake River.

The best location for capturing images of the rut runs from Windy Point north to Jenny Lake. In the mornings, the elk will make their way up from the Snake River towards the forests at the base of the mountains. In the evenings, the whole thing happens in reverse.

The best action in the morning tends to be between Windy Point and the Bradley Taggart parking area. In the afternoons, I suggest the one-way road on the north end of Jenny Lake that begins at String Lake or the first couple miles of River Road. Much like Rocky Mountain National Park, everything is temperature dependent. If temps are in the bottom 50s and below, then action will be happening. If you have clouds on top of that, then you can have hours of great photography.

Yellowstone National Park.

The most important thing you need to understand about Yellowstone is that it is overrated in terms of the elk rut. Don’t get me wrong, Yellowstone is an amazing place for wildlife photography, but the stories you have heard about the elk are probably old. You see, Yellowstone once had a disastrously overpopulation of elk. Up until the early 2000s, the national park held around 30,000 of these animals – just across the Northern Range! Today, that population is down to around 5,000, which is exactly where it should be according to biologists.

Things function more naturally these days thanks to three animals: wolves, bears, and lake trout.

First the wolves. These canines were reintroduced in 1995 – right about the time when the population of elk began to decline. Though wolves significantly impact elk populations on a daily basis, it’s through what we call the ecology of fear more so than actual predation. In other words, wolves force elk to act like elk. Before the reintroduction, elk would stand around in the open meadows devouring everything they could get their teeth around. Now, elk are on the move. They hide out in the forests. They are pushed around by wolf packs. And once again elk act like elk and the ecosystem is slowly beginning to heal. But the real reduction in population of the elk has little to do with the wolves themselves.

In the early 1990s, right about the time that wolves showed up, another event occurred that should have been breaking news but went unnoticed by the world: the first lake trout was caught in Yellowstone Lake. Lake trout are native to the Great Lakes – not Yellowstone. They get very large, are very aggressive, and have no natural predators. Yellowstone cutthroat trout on the other hand are native, and their population declined by 99% within 10 years of the first lake trout showing up because of predation by the far larger invasive species of fish.

Yellowstone cutthroat trout have always been a major food source for grizzly bears in the park. Much like Alaska’s salmon run, the spring run of Yellowstone cutthroats would find grizzlies lining key areas of rivers to gorge on the spawning trout. When the native trout population collapsed by 99%, all those bears turned to another food source in the spring and early summer: elk calves. And now, up to 70% of the elk calves in Yellowstone National Park are eaten by grizzlies each year.

With the drastic reduction in the elk population in Yellowstone over the last 20 years, the park is no longer one of the top spots for photographing the rut. And it’s important to understand that Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Tetons National Park offer such easy access to elk photographs because those animals are overpopulated there as well. Rocky Mountain National Park has no wolves or grizzly bears, and people are paid to shoot elk to try and reduce the population. Likewise, the elk population in Jackson Hole is so overpopulated that the public is allowed to hunt elk inside of both the National Park and the National Elk Refuge each year.

If you find yourself in Yellowstone at the end of September, travel the Old Gardiner road. I mention this place in regard to photographing pronghorn, but it is the last great place for elk photography in Yellowstone – in my humble opinion.

Jasper National Park.

As I mentioned in the first article of this series, this is hand’s down my favorite place to photograph the elk rut. Rocky Mountain National Park has significantly more elk than Jasper, but it’s the size of these boys along with the unique backgrounds and lots of other factors at work here that keeps me coming back every year.

The population is not very large, so the location of activity is not as predictable as some the US parks, but the road between Jasper and Hinton can be the stuff of legend. Keep an eye out along the edge of the Athabascan River. Not a year goes by that I don’t find action in the water. And spend as much time as possible searching the big meadows around the airport east of town. Anywhere you find open fields, you stand a chance of finding elk in this park.

Try to work with environmental shots to include mountainous backdrops or the glacial blue of the Athabascan River. The forest around this area is boreal – also known as the snow forest – and is simply gorgeous come time for the peak of the elk rut. Aspens will certainly be aflame and you are likely to find fresh snow in the mountains surrounding the valley. The scenery here is quite unlike any place in the lower 48 states. Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana would give you the closest idea of what to expect in terms of scenery. The Canadian Rockies are truly breathtaking.