MOUNT ST. HELENS — Ten elk moved ghostlike across the valley floor, appearing and vanishing as they eased over the rolling terrain of the Mount St. Helens mudflow.
They stared at the green truck and the green alfalfa hay spilling over the sides and along the muddy, potholed road that winds through the 2,744-acre Mount St. Helens Wildlife Area.
The elk, shy and wild most of the year, headed for the food as soon as the truck was 100 yards away. Some of the elk looked thin with hair missing in patches on their flanks.
“We came down this morning and saw them eating hay out of the back of the truck,” said Brian Calkins, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s wildlife area manager. “They’re hungry.”
One of the coldest, snowiest winters in years coupled with an overpopulation of elk on Mount St. Helens has prompted winter elk feeding on the mudflow for the second year in a row. Fish and Wildlife is feeding hay to about 400 elk a day there.
“We’ve seen up to 600 elk this winter already,” Calkins said.
Mark and Dawn Smith, owners of the nearby Eco-Park Resort, also are feeding elk on their 90 acres along the North Fork Toutle River.
“We believe wildlife should take care of themselves, but we’ve been supplementing food as volunteers,” Mark Smith said. “There have been changes up here and loss of elk habitat from forest regrowth, and the river comes up and washes away huge amounts of winter habitat.”
The winter feeding program, which cost Fish and Wildlife about $63,000 last year, is a stop-gap measure to keep stressed elk from starving to death, Calkins said.
Elk can eat 8 to 10 pounds of hay a day.
Eventually, stepped-up hunting of the herd which now numbers about 13,000 will bring the population to about 10,000 elk within five years, which is the number that the land around Mount St. Helens can support, Calkins said.
But for now, it’s a choice between winter feeding or seeing many elk stagger toward death by starvation or disease.
Elk were among the first animals to return to Mount St. Helens after the gigantic eruption and mudflow on May 18, 1980.
The eruption blew down millions of trees and turned the area into the largest clear cut in the Northwest. Elk thrive on the grasses, sedges and brush that sprout when trees no longer shade the land.
Suddenly, the Mount St. Helens elk herd was living in a food-rich paradise, and the population boomed.
Smith, whose family owned the Spirit Lake Lodge, which was destroyed in the eruption, said the Mount St. Helens herd was not that big before the eruption.
“We were told that 6,000 elk probably died in the eruption, and we said, ‘Wow, we’ve never seen 6,000 elk up here,’ ” Smith said.
The elk herd grew, and it became common to see six-point bull elk and dozens of cow elk grazing on the mudflow. Many experts think that the herd is even larger than it was when European settlers arrived in Washington.
But the Weyerhaeuser Co. planted young trees on thousands of blast-ravaged acres, and natural seeding sprouted trees on thousands of acres of public land. The trees thrived, and they’re now shading out the grasses and sedges that elk eat.
In addition, timber harvest has slowed or stopped on much of the neighboring national forest land, so there are fewer clear cuts, said Dave Ware, game manager for Fish and Wildlife.
It adds up to less food for the giant herd, especially during winter, when heavy snows force elk to travel down from the high country to the river valleys.
Feeding the Mount St. Helens elk is the right thing to do until special hunting seasons can trim the herd and projects to create stable forage areas along the Toutle River get established, Ware said. The North Fork has unstable banks through the mudflow, and the river rampages around during high water and washes forage areas down to bare sand, Smith said.
Some people, mainly those opposed to hunting, might not like the idea of reducing the size of the herd through hunting, but it is the best way to reduce the population, Ware said.
If the herd is not hunted, the elk population will still fall through starvation, disease and lower birth rates from stressed animals, Ware said.
“The question for all of us is whether that is better than hunters harvesting the animals and using the meat,” Ware said.
Grizzly bears, cougars and wolves are natural predators of elk, but people wiped out the bears and wolves in Washington decades ago.
Cougars are thriving, but there aren’t enough to keep the herd in check.
The job falls to people, starvation or disease, Ware said.
Fish and Wildlife issued 60 permits to hunt in the Mount St. Helens Wildlife Area last fall, and added 1,300 for the St. Helens Tree Farm.
The results are not clear because hunters didn’t have to turn in mandatory reports until Jan. 31. Biologists have not yet evaluated all the information.
It will take years to trim the herd, as elk continue to produce calves every spring, and hunting is difficult. Only 30 percent to 50 percent of hunters actually kill an elk, Ware said.
Feeding is happening on only one part of the sprawling range of the Mount St. Helens herd, which is probably the biggest in the state. All told, the 13,000 elk roam from I-5 to the crest of the Cascade Range and from the Oregon border to U.S. 12, Ware said.
That is a lot of land, but there are signs that the herd is even outgrowing the summer range. Tests of elk killed during fall show that many aren’t putting on enough fat during the salad days of summer and early fall to survive a hard winter. Some Mount St. Helens elk are in a constant state of malnutrition, Ware said.
Fish and Wildlife doesn’t want to feed elk every winter at Mount St. Helens. The feeding allows many animals to survive and reproduce beyond the land’s ability to provide food.
Elk also tend to gather at feeding spots, which can increase the spread of disease.
The story is different for the big Yakima elk herd in central and Eastern Washington. Fish and Wildlife has fed the Yakima herd which numbers between 9,500 and 11,000 for years, Ware said.
The Yakima herd has great spring, summer and fall range, but people took away the winter range, Ware said. Homes, farms and orchards sit where Yakima elk used to winter.
Fish and Wildlife maintains 100 miles of fence, and feeds the Yakima herd to keep them out of neighborhoods and agricultural land, Ware said.
“We’re trying to keep the Yakima elk out of harm’s way,” he added.
That is very different from Mount St. Helens, where the land can support about 10,000 elk without winter feeding, Ware said.
The Mount St. Helens Wildlife Area is closed to the public until May 1 to reduce stress on animals.
Elk feeding will probably continue into spring until natural food appears again, Calkins said.
But some elk will die this winter.
“Feeding in itself is not a sure thing to keep all animals alive,” Calkins said. “There are always weaker or older or diseased animals that are not going to make it through the winter.”
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