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Wapiti Wisdom

By David Petersen

Found in: | Outside | Hunting | Wildlife |

I've hunted wapiti for twenty-five years. Yet I wouldn't dare to assert a "best" way to go about it. In my experience, best is always relative. Relative for instance, to terrain and vegetation, rut stage, hunting pressure, local game populations, weather and so much more ? including your personal preferences and priorities, woodcraft skills, physical stamina and, let's face it, bank account.

Hippy-hoppity, here comes the wapiti.

A silly little kiddy-ditty, you bet, but an easy way to remember the correct pronunciation of the proper name of North America's second-largest deer. Not wa-PEE-de, but WOP-it-tee. While the word is Shawnee for "white rump," "beige butt" would be more apt. The familiar name "elk," meanwhile, appears to trace back to a case of mistaken identity, when early immigrants farmers and tradesmen, not hunters and naturalists misidentified the wapiti, a new and unfamiliar species to them, as elch (German) or elg (Danish and Norwegian), their native names for moose.

By any name, the huge deer is today the most popular big-game trophy in North America. And for good reasons a'plenty: It is huge, averaging five hundred pounds for mature cows and seven hundred pounds for 6x6 bulls, netting about two hundred pounds of choice red meat that's notably lighter and less "gamey" than venison. And of course the wapiti wears massive, ornate antlers, bugles magnificently during early fall archery seasons and animates some of the loveliest wild places on the continent. And thanks to the heroic efforts of the American hunter/conservationist community, elk today are numerous and widespread at least a million wild, free-ranging wapiti currently roam twenty-six states and all eleven Canadian provinces putting a "hunt of a lifetime" within the reach of anyone with healthy lungs and legs and the price of a tag, a tent and a few tanks of gas.

About 1.3 million years ago, early in the Pleistocene epoch (the most recent great ice age), elk first appeared as a distinct genus, Cervus, in central Asia, having split from the sika deer lineage. From their likely origins in the foothills of the Himalayas, these ancestral elk spread west into Europe, adapting to their new surroundings to become the red deer (Cervus elaphus elaphus). At the same time, another branch of the primordial Cervus clan drifted east, adapting to the hard winters, high mountains and open steppes of Mongolia and the Siberian Uplands. Descendants of this second group continued to disperse across the Chukchi Peninsula and, eventually, onto the low-lying "mammoth steppe" of Beringia, a.k.a. the Bering Land Bridge. And there they remained for hundreds of millennia, adapting to this harsh, half-Asian, half-American landscape to become the modern wapiti we know today (Cervus elaphus canadensis).

As the last Ice Age thawed (called W�rm in Europe, Wisconsin in North America), sea levels rose and Beringia began slowly to "sink" an inundation that concluded only about ten thousand years ago. Forced to higher ground, some Beringian wapiti were isolated on the Siberian side, while others were "stranded" in Alaska. And so it is today that wapiti on both sides of the Bering Strait look the same, sound the same, behave the same, even stink the same. They are the same. From Alaska, wapiti dispersed to occupy every habitable niche throughout the continent ... and then went extinct as Alaska grew colder again (they've recently been reintroduced there as island populations).

Wapiti rut from late August through mid-October. During this time, bulls employ both vocal and visual advertisements to attract females. Those same bugles and antlers serve secondarily as threats to intimidate competing males. In a balanced population, a rutting hierarchy evolves that allows the fittest mature bulls to enjoy most of the breeding and thereby pass their superior genes on to future generations. In all deer species, antlers are biological "luxuries." No matter how genetically blessed a bull or buck may be, only after the animal's primary nutritional needs are satisfied - bone and muscle growth, the healing of injuries and infections - will "leftover" nutritional resources be channeled into exceptional antler growth. Thus are big antlers indicative not only of good genes, but also of an exceptionally efficient foraging strategy (good habitat helps). This synergetic combination of "nature and nurture" explains why romantically inclined cows seek out big-antlered bugle boys to father their calves. Only as an evolutionary afterthought did antlers come to serve as sparring weapons.

If we add to the instinctive attraction of big antlers the fact that older bulls are more experienced and efficient in the delicate art of courting, we begin to understand not only why, but how a single mature bull can attract a harem of as many as several dozen cows, while lesser bulls get none.

Alas, the best-laid plans ...

Queering this whole elaborate arrangement is the modern craze for trophy hunting. The situation we have today, where industry and ego have teamed up to prompt most hunters to try their best to kill the biggest males they can, rubs hard against both natural selection and elk social harmony. When the number of mature bulls in a given area is unnaturally depressed by focused hunting as is the case across most of elk country today, younger, relatively inexperienced males are left to do most of the breeding. And generally they do it poorly, leading to stressed cows, late and failed pregnancies, smaller and later-born calves the following spring and higher calf mortality come winter.

Thus, in the long and prudent view, our passion for killing trophy bulls is biologically reckless.

Most cows begin breeding in their third autumn and produce one calf per year throughout their long reproductive lives. Calving season is mid-May through mid-June, peaking around the first of June. At birth, calves average about 35 pounds. Weight gain is rapid, with youngsters adding more than a pound a day throughout the summer. By September, a healthy calf will be as big as an adult deer and can fend for itself should Mom meet with an arrow. Cows can live twenty years or longer in the wild, while males are lucky to make it past the age of three, when they become legal game in most states as "rag-horns." (While nobody seems to know the origin of this slang term, it is used by biologists as well as hunters in reference to young, branch-antlered bulls and is neither pejorative, complimentary, nor accurately descriptive.) Beyond the security of national parks, precious few bulls in these times of rampant habitat destruction and trophy-hunting mania attain the prime antler-growing ages of six to twelve years.

* * *

I've hunted wapiti for twenty-five years. Yet I wouldn't dare to assert a "best" way to go about it. In my experience, best is always relative. Relative for instance, to terrain and vegetation, rut stage, hunting pressure, local game populations, weather and so much more ... including your personal preferences and priorities, woodcraft skills, physical stamina and, let's face it, bank account.

For the initial few years of my elking career, I eagerly took the first legal animal I got a clean crack at. With experience, "any elk" got too easy and my interest shifted to killing, just once, an exceptional 6x6. I spent the next four years pursuing that goal. With a "record book" head finally on my wall (but in no record book, thank you), I settled back into meat hunting, generally killing young bulls as they tended to be the first to present themselves. In recent years I've evolved into a trophy meat hunter, holding out for young fat cows and "spoon meat" calves, since these two classes are the most biologically expendable while providing the finest meat. Almost comically, in my quest to kill a calf I have so far failed, already investing more seasons trying than it took me to bag a trophy bull. Thus have I come to think of myself, and proudly, as a trophy calf hunter.

Although I've never experienced more thrilling hunts than those that conclude in a screaming, brush-bashing, close-quarters bugling duel with a testosterone-drunk bull, such explosive action is scarce as fur on a fish these days, at least for us average Joes and Josaphines. I no longer use a bugle, as the technique has been so massively abused that it rarely attracts bulls any more but frequently shuts them up and scares them away, while molesting the hunt for other hunters and disrupting the natural workings of the rut by silencing bugling bulls. Cow calling remains viable, though far from magical, and is rapidly going the way of bugling as it too has been greedily marketed and amateurishly abused.

Most of the elk I've killed in recent years have been ambushed at close range over secluded spring pools in dense forest, a long hike from the nearest road, ATV trail, cow pie or call-tooting nimrod. But I'm lucky in that regard, since such oases of wildness are increasingly hard to find on our increasingly over-logged, overgrazed, over-roaded, motor-infested public lands. And public lands, for most of us, are our last resort.

In sum, my advice is to be suspicious of gadgets claiming to provide an "easy" way to kill elk. There is no easy way, nor should there be. Rather than roaming the woods blowing on toy whistles or driving the roads hoping to spot pot-shotable game, become an old-fashioned woodsman (or woman). Learn all you can about the lives, needs and behavior of your quarry, its preferred habitats and the greater ecosystem of which it is a functioning part. Stay on your feet (unless you're sitting on a stand) and well off the roads. Studies confirm that elk numbers and daylight activity dramatically increase beyond a half-mile from the nearest public road, trail or clear-cut. Stay tactically flexible in order to take advantage of any ethical opportunity that presents itself.

"Yes," exclaims hunter and world-renowned elk biologist Val Geist, "I'd rather eat meat taken from the wild forests with skill, toil and sweat. It keeps one honest in our culture of fancy illusions."

David Petersen is the author of Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World and Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America.