Minnesota large-scale elk study is underway

MN DNR elk study collar

The Minnesota DNR began a large-scale elk research study in January to improve our understanding of baseline elk population dynamics (e.g., pregnancy rates, survival rates of adults vs. calves, survival rates of males vs. females, causes of mortality and movement amongst herds), as well as how elk use the landscape among seasons and years. This past winter we were able to put GPS trackers (either collars or ear tags) on 28 elk. This is more elk than we have ever tracked in Minnesota!

The effort to capture and collar elk was monumental and involved staff from three of our wildlife research groups, wildlife managers and biologists from two regions, enforcement pilots, Tribal partners from the Red Lake Nation and Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and cooperating private landowners. In addition to putting GPS collars or GPS ear tags on elk, the team also collected biological measurements and samples such as body condition, pregnancy status, hair and fecal samples, and blood. These samples provide additional information to combine with survival and other vital rates to give a fuller picture our elk population, challenges they face (such as harsh winters, parasites and diseases), and how those challenges impact things like population growth and genetics.

Gearing up for more elk research this spring

Our elk team is still recovering from a fun but intense winter field season, and we are also gearing up for elk calving season!

This spring we intend to capture and collar up to 25 newborn elk. We will accomplish this using a couple methods. To find most calves, we will rely on a specialized transmitter that we attached to pregnant cows when they were GPS-collared. When the cow elk gives birth, the transmitter will send us an email and text message alerting us that a calf was born. We can then navigate to the transmitter location to begin searching for the calf.

The other method we’ll employ to find calves involves using a Cessna 206 airplane with an infrared camera platform. We will fly at high altitudes over elk to search for calves, and then direct a ground crew to the calves’ location. The high altitudes we can fly at with our new plane and camera eliminates noise disturbance from the plane and reduces stress for both the cow and calf. We expect our calf handling time to be less than 10 minutes, which further reduces stress on cows and calves.

After calves are collared, we will continue to monitor GPS-tagged adults and calves for the next several years. And next year we will repeat our process to capture more adults in winter and more calves in spring. A large number of tracked animals (our “sample size”) improves how we analyze data and increases our confidence in results from those analyses.

Please stay tuned, including on our elk management webpage, for more information about this exciting project later this summer!