ESPN Hunting

HAZARD, Ky. — "Ary elk?" Curtis Combs asked his son James as the latter scanned the distant mountains, valleys and gaps with his binocular.

"Nothing," said James, lowering the glasses. "I think they got the word last week."

Curtis kept walking to where Jeremiah Jones had his own binocular trained on another quadrant. Combs asked the same question and got the same answer. On this, the day before the second week of the 2009 Kentucky bull elk quota hunt opened, perhaps the survivors had sensed that it was a dangerous time to be traveling the relatively open country of reclaimed strip mine land.

Jones was among the 43,008 people who had applied for the opportunity to participate in the Kentucky elk season, and was one of 1,000 hunters (no more than 10 percent of which were nonresidents) who had actually drawn a treasured tag last May.

Rarer still, his bull tag was one of only 250 issued, and it allowed him to take one with a firearm or a bow. Jones planned on the latter, though others who appreciated how long it took to draw any kind of elk tag advised him to take the first legal Kentucky bull he saw with a gun.

First, however, Jones had to locate one, which was the purpose of the visit to the mine land on and around Lost Mountain in southeastern Kentucky.

Jones, with his 9-year-old son Riley and father Jackie, had travelled to Hazard in what Kentuckians call the East Coalfield from his home across the state at Sturgis in the West Coalfield. The Combs are family friends who hunt whitetail on Jones land, and had invited the Joneses' to stay at the Combs Motel in Hazard, which Curtis manages.

Though Perry County's Lost Mountain and most of its environs were on mine land closed to public hunting, it still offered one of the best vantage points to spot elk on property that was available to Jones.

Forty-five minutes of scanning revealed nothing more than other hunters and a few deer. When they walked back down to their vehicles, however, Jackie excitedly told them of a bull elk and three cows that had crossed the road behind the trucks.

"I was just standing there and out popped a cow," said the elder Jones, pointing to a trail about 20 yards from where they stood. "Then two more cows came out and crossed, and a big 6-by-6 bull was trailing them. He was so close I could have hit him with a rock, but he didn't pay a bit more attention to me than the man in the moon. They all crossed the road and went on."

Home again
Kentucky elk can be full of such surprises, and perhaps the biggest surprise is that they are here at all. In a state much more famous for bourbon whiskey and big whitetails, elk are prospering again in their native land. Though the big deer were present in the state when the first white settlers arrived, they had been wiped out by the middle of the 19th century.

Their presence in modern times owes to a joint effort that mainly involved the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources and mine companies.

Beginning in 1997, almost 2,000 elk were trapped in various Rocky Mountain states and transported to southeastern Kentucky. The first seven were released on reclaimed strip mine land in Perry County not far from Hazard.

Poaching was a problem at first. Many of the original elk imported into the state wore radio neck collars to track their movements, and at least some of these wound up being reattached to coal trains and trucks heading in all directions after their original wearers were shot illegally.

Kentucky's elk were not to be denied their second coming, however, and their population explosion during the past 12 years has some people wondering if the 1,000 quota hunt tags issued this year are enough to manage the herd.

By most estimates, there are a bit more than 11,000 elk inhabiting the 16-county region where restricted hunting is allowed. Some inhabit wildlife management areas; others live on private land or mine property with restricted access. There's even a few elk in Virginia and West Virginia that apparently wandered in from Kentucky, and Tennessee has a small population.

In fact, five Tennessee hunters, out of almost 13,000 who participated in a quota hunt drawing, were granted tags to hunt elk in four eastern counties of the Volunteer State during the Oct. 19-23 season. Three of the Tennessee hunters got their bulls within 30 minutes after the quota hunt began in the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area.

The Tennessee restoration effort got underway in 2000 when 50 free-ranging elk from Canada were released into the Royal Blue Wildlife Management Area. The population is now estimated to be above 300, and doesn't include elk that were restocked in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where hunting is never allowed.

There, park officials noted that 19 calves were born last spring, of which 16 survived through the summer. There are now an estimated 110 elk in the park.

Hunts don't deter population boom
Like Tennessee, Kentucky started out small with its quota hunts (12 tags were issued in 2001) and they grew exponentially with the herd.

In the years between 2001 and 2004, a dozen tags were issued each season. In 2004, 40 tags were drawn; in 2005, 100 and so on. Last year, 400 tags were available.

Appalachian natives such as Curtis and James Combs appreciate the return of elk to their mountains, but wish that more consideration were given locals in the tag-drawing process. Though they've applied for a tag every year, they've yet to be drawn for either a bull or a cow tag.

Then, too, the increase in "outfitters" that lock up available private land raises troubling prospects in a region where disagreements tend to escalate into something more serious.

Drawing a bull tag is the real hurdle hereabouts; getting a bull is almost a slam-dunk. Before this year, hunter success ratios averaged more than 90 percent, if only because there were fewer available tags.

During the recently completed bull elk quota hunt, 42 of the 250 bull tags issued went unfilled, for a success ratio of 86 percent. Ten bulls were taken with archery equipment, and one with a muzzleloader. The rest were killed with modern firearms.

If bowhunters hold the unfilled tags, they have until Jan. 18 to take a bull. Hunters who are allowed to use crossbows have until Dec. 31. The cow elk firearm hunts are set for Nov. 14-23 and Dec. 12-25.

David Hale of Knight & Hale Game Calls of Cadiz, Ky., was among the first wave of hunters in this year's two-part bull elk quota hunt. His 6x6 bull taken near Cumberland Gap was one of several hundred Utah elk released in the Bluegrass State.

In 1997, when it was trapped, it was two years old. As the veteran Kentucky hunter noted, the 14-year-old bull "was on his way down" when Hale shot it with a .30-06. In this case, the trophy wasn't the rack, but rather the yellow ear tag imprinted with the number "39" that denoted its homeland and other information.

"We get a lot of calls from people who shoot elk with ear tags," says Tina Brunjes, big game program coordinator for Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Resources. "Most of them are just curious about the background and where the elk came from. We tagged and collared a lot of Kentucky elk in the last few years, though, so not all of the ear tags denote elk from out of state."

The current state-record typical elk was a non-resident with ear tags. The 371-inch bull was shot in 2007 in Bell County. The non-typical record, 367 7/8, was a Kentucky bull that was taken in Harlan County in 2008, though a poached 381 6/8-inch non-typical was confiscated a few years back. It was presumed to be a stocked elk.

One question in the minds of wildlife biologists was how well Rocky Mountain elk would acclimate to Kentucky; apparently, they've made themselves right at home.

"Some big, Kentucky-born elk have been coming in during the last few seasons," noted Gabe Jenkins, who supervised the Hazard check station. "The biggest bull brought in this year green-scored 363 inches and it was born in Kentucky. Elk are really doing fine here. There's a lot of good browse and not much to bother them."

Indeed, though many observers thought that not much good could come from strip mines except paychecks, the coal companies have provided a rich environment for elk.

Typically, strip-mined, flatop mountains that have been reclaimed by overspreading them with fresh topsoil and then planting various evergreen trees, legumes including lespedeza and alfalfa, and shrubs such as autumn olive characterize much of the highlands of eastern Kentucky. Otherwise, hardwoods, broom sedge and native weeds flourish.

"He had a lot of mass and beam length but not many points," Hale said of his elk, another import whose DNA no doubt gave the local gene pool a boost during the last few years. "When I went to the check station to find out about the yellow tag in his ear, I was told it was from a bull killed three years ago. 'That's interesting,' I said, 'because that elk is over there in the back of my truck.'

"Then they rechecked and told me it was from Utah. It's the best elk I ever killed in Kentucky, because it's the only one I ever killed in Kentucky. And if I never get to hunt here again, at least I can say I killed an elk in my home state, even if he wasn't born in my home state."

A very short hunt
The elk that his father saw notwithstanding, there was nothing in the Lost Mountain spotting session that gave Jeremiah Jones confidence that land available to him in the Perry County tract of Elk Hunt Unit 2 would help him fill his tag. Beside, he wasn't interested in a long-range rifle shot; he wanted an archery bull.

The day before the second quota hunt opened, when his scouting posse split up to spot different areas, Jones had seen plenty of elk on the Paul Van Booven Wildlife Management Area in Breathitt County.

Though small at 2,293 acres, the WMA is available only to junior gun hunters (five of whom got tags; four filled them) and archers during the quota hunt. Considering its size, then, Van Booven is loaded with elk.

Opening morning of the second bull elk quota hunt found three generations of Joneses climbing a relatively low ridge covered with oaks, maples and hickory trees.

Elk sign was abundant, but the only bull the trio saw and heard was a big 6-by-6 with cows on an opposite height named Rattlesnake Ridge. They watched and listened as the bull bugled at another distant rival outside the WMA boundaries.

Within an hour they went back to their truck, studied the approach routes to the bull with binoculars, then determined how best to attempt a stalk.

As the hunters drove the circuitous gravel road toward the base of the ridge, however, they spotted another bull, a young 6 x 5, feeding on pokeberries in a cove adjacent to the route they followed.

It came down to a choice between going after the satellite bull preoccupied with gorging on pokeberries, or trying for the heavy-antlered herd bull on the ridge. That posed a problematic stalk for a bowhunter because the bull had a harem, and his wasn't the only set of eyes watching for approaching danger.

Additionally, the phase of the rut when aggressive herd bulls often come to the sound of a bugle was over. Jones might entice the bull with a cow call, but it was likely to go the other way with its herd if Jones tried to challenge it by bugling.

In the end, Jones elected to go after the younger elk. Quietly he got out of the parked truck with his bow, nocked an arrow, bent over at the waist and slowly moved toward the bull until he was presented with a broadside shot. The stalk lasted 30 minutes.

The first arrow, tipped with a Rage expandable broadhead, made a two-inch gash when it penetrated behind the bull's front shoulder. A follow-up arrow, though not necessary, went into the animal's opposite side when it wheeled. Either shot double-lunged the elk, and it died quickly within 100 yards of where it was feeding.

After waiting for a few minutes, Jones, his son and his father located the downed elk. A call for assistance soon brought Curtis and James Combs to the scene, and the group spent the next several minutes loading the 560-pound bull, which weighed 560 pounds field-dressed.

As Jones' bull was being winched to the road for pickup, atop Rattlesnake Ridge the big 6x6 bugled once more at the distant intruder, then turned and disappeared into the planted pines where his anxious cows waited.