Hunting depredating elk at night – with a dart gun

CAPTION: John Guthrie is all smiles as he enters the blind, where they spent most of the night trying to dart unwelcome elk in a crop field.

I told Landowner/Sportsman Coordinator John Guthrie, “tonight is either going to be the best night of work ever, or it is going to be the worst."  He chided as he cut me off.

One of my favorite shows growing up as a child was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I was enthralled as Marlin Perkins chased down grizzly bears or giraffes and darted them from a helicopter. They always got their game and no one ever got hurt. But I don’t recall ever watching them do what we wanted to try.

CAPTION: John Guthrie loads a telemetry device into a dart. Elk can travel long distances after being darted, and because we were working at night, a telemetry dart was necessary. Unfortunately, it adds weight and decreases effective range.

We were preparing to climb inside a muggy, mosquito-infested ground blind in hopes of darting an elk that grazed within 35 yards of our concealed location. The center pivot just crossed our end of the field, saturating the area and the blind.

John is hoping to develop some creative solutions to prevent elk damage and depredations to private land. To do this, he needs to capture elk that are actively using crop fields. He wants to attach gps radio collars on cow elk, and then target these collared elk with different hazing scenarios to gauge their reaction and efficacy to different methods. The collars will collect animal locations every 15 minutes .

CAPTION: John Guthrie places branches in the field to help estimate distance from the blind so they can tell if the elk is in range of the dart gun.

Typically, we capture elk by darting or net-gunning them from a helicopter. But due to the amount of fences, powerlines, and irrigation structures, it was decided a helicopter was not feasible. We also didn’t want to haze the animals away from the private land during capture with the helicopter, so we were determined to sit in the ground blind placed near a trail the elk used to enter the alfalfa field.

We had elk in the field on four different occasions, but none within our limited range of the dart gun, so at 2 a.m, we finally called it a night.

I’ve certainly had worse nights or days of work, even though we weren’t able to capture our intended quarry. And we learned a lot about elk behavior using the field that night and can hopefully adjust our location and tactics to be more successful in the future.

Marlin Perkins used to say knowledge is the richest prize we can acquire in the wild kingdom, so we should be in good shape  next time out.