[guitar music]
[Narrator] Welcome to Wind Cave National Park: A park with a problem. As recently as 2010,
over 900 elk resided in the park but, unfortunately, this was at least twice as
many elk as the 28,000 acre park was able to support and the problem was
getting worse every year, but how did the park get to this point and what to do
about it? Once upon a time the Black Hills of
South Dakota were teeming with large animals, but as settlers moved into the
area nearly all of the large animals including bison, elk, black bears, grizzly
bears, wolves, and mountain lions were hunted to local extinction or extirpated
from the Black Hills. As conservation movements gained ground around the turn
of the 20th century, people begin to look for places to reintroduce so-called
charismatic large game animals. The wide-open prairies of the newly created
Wind Cave National Park proved promising ground on which to reintroduce
certain species. Unfortunately, charismatic in those days meant safe,
cute, and tasty. Elk and Bison fit the bill perfectly, Wolves and Bears did not. At first,
this was not problem. In fact, it probably helped the small groups of reintroduced
animals survive. However, over time an abundance of grazing land and the nearly
complete absence of predators led to a burgeoning elk population. This is a
concept called "carrying capacity." Essentially, how many animals a given
area can support and here I would like to introduce you to someone.
[Duane Weber] Howdy, I'm Duane Weber. I'm a biologic technician at Wind Cave National Park
here in beautiful South Dakota.
[Narrator] Duane Weber is going to discuss the
concept of "carrying capacity."
[Duane] Any piece of land can only produce so much forage
and only provide so much habitat for a limited number of animals and so
essentially "carrying capacity" and the habitat those components of food, water,
shelter, space, those are all things that every animal needs.
Unfortunately, when an area has too many animals were not enough habitat bad
things happen. At first, resources such as water and food are depleted. If the
problem continues the land will be over grazed and animals will start dying.
This was exactly the sort of problem that Wind Cave National Park was facing. The
park needed a plan to deal with our ever expanding Elk population.
[Duane] The estimated elk population here at Wind Cave National Park is hovering
around 800 animals or so which is a little more than twice what we should
have. Our goal population is about 270 to 470 so in order to get our population
down to those numbers we needed to do something and like any good agency our
first plan was to move forward and create a plan. We had our share of public
meetings. We gathered input from anybody who was interested what was going on at
this National Park. That information was distilled down a draft plan was then
presented to the public and at that point we also let the public know what
our preferred alternative was and eventually in December of 2009, the plan
was approved and signed off and implementation of that plan was then
available and we're ready to go from there.
[Narrator] Other parks have faced similar
problems and had to solve those problems using the same planning process as Wind
Cave National Park.
[Duane] Two other parks that have had large mammal populations that
they've had to control are Theodore Roosevelt National Park up in North
Dakota and Rocky Mountain National Park down in Colorado. They have done a
similar management plan process but their answer to controlling
their elk populations came out considerably different than ours.
They have a annual cull operation and with firearms they actually sharp shoot
the elk from there right within the park boundaries.
The meat is then retrieved from the backcountry and winds up being donated
to food pantries and soup kitchens. Yellowstone National Park went the route
of reintroducing wolves into the park. The wolves are not only killing some of
the elk but they also provide an impetus to get those elk to
continuously move if the prey animals continue to move then consequently they
have a smaller impact on the vegetation that's available to them. Yellowstone has
seen a tremendous control of their elk population as well as a resurgence of a
lot of their plant species that had been severely over grazed by elk with the
introduction of wolves back into the park so for them wolves are working
really well.
[Narrator] While these solutions fit Rocky Mountain, Theodore Roosevelt, and
Yellowstone National Parks well as it turns out they would not work for Wind
Cave National Park. Wind Cave National Park faced its own unique challenges and
hurdles. Hunting inside a national park is not part of our enabling
legislation or our rules and regulations so in order to have done any
honest-to-goodness hunting inside Wind Cave National Park it would have
literally taken an act of Congress a change in our enabling legislation that
would have had to go through the US House and Senate.
[Narrator] Luckily, wolf reintroduction would
not take an act of Congress. Nevertheless, what worked at
Yellowstone National Park could not work for Wind Cave National Park.
[Duane] Do you have
to take into consideration the incredibly large area the literally
thousands hundreds of thousands of square miles that the Yellowstone
ecosystem has that they were able to utilize as part of the reintroduction of
wolves. Wind Cave National Park is about 33,000 acres, a relatively small island
compared especially compared to the place like Yellowstone and it would
barely provide enough habitat and terrain for wolves to survive in.
[Narrator] So, without options of hunting or wolf reintroduction Wind Cave National Park
needed a unique solution
[Duane] The option that was chosen after the analysis for the
Wind Cave Elk Management Plan the option that we chose, the most viable option
most cost effective option, as well as the most
acceptable option to the people was the installation of elk jump gates. This is
one of the elk jump gates it's already been installed it has been in operation
for a little over a year. In its open position right now Elk can easily move in
and out of the park. The idea is that elk regularly move out
of the park in the early spring in order to calve that the elk that are out of the
park, once a calve, we can close those gates
holding those animals outside the park right on through the end through the
fall, through the fall hunting seasons that take place on the surrounding
public and private lands and that the hunters during those fall seasons are
the ones that will help us control our population. There have now been 16 of
these elk jump gates installed along the western boundary. The fence has been
rebuilt reinforced to a full seven foot height. The spring of 2011 was our first
chance to fully use our elk jump gates. We were hopeful that a several hundred
elk would leave the park through our elk jump gates and that we would then be
able to close those gates in late June blocking a large number of animals out.
That did not happen. We had a hundred, perhaps 150, animals out of the park when
we closed the gates in late June but, on the encouraging side, once the gates were
in the closed position at no time did we have any of the elk that had been
essentially closed out of the park. At no time that we have did we have any
evidence that any of those elk found their way back into the park, breached
the fence in any location so as a first test for the elk gates and for the new
elk fence I think it's been a success.
[helicopter whirring]
In the near future, we will likely add hazing to our late winter/early spring operations to push a
larger number of elk out of the park because that's their normal time to
leave anyway and that with a larger number of elk out
of the park we will again close the gates in late June and hold those
animals out of the park for the spring, summer, and through the fall hunting
seasons where a larger number of them hopefully will be taken by hunters thus
helping us with our population