BISMARCK, N.D.—The National Park Service has released a report on possible ways to thin an overpopulated elk herd at North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Officials say say action to cull the herd is at least a year away.
The inch-thick document, released Wednesday, took five years to craft. It contains a “range of reasonable options,” including volunteer shooters and relocating elk after checking them for disease, Theodore Roosevelt Superintendent Valerie Naylor said.
Other options include encouraging hunting outside the park where the elk have escaped fenced boundaries, or rounding up excess elk and euthanizing them.
“We looked at every possible alternative and the consequences of them,” Naylor said.
Comments on the agency’s management plan and environmental impact statement will be taken for three months. Public hearings will be held during that time, though the dates and times of the hearings won’t be announced until next year, the agency said.
The ideal elk population at the park, which covers about 70,000 acres, is about 400 but the herd has grown to about 900, Naylor said.
The park’s elk population has twice met the maximum capacity—in 1993 and 2000—and excess animals were rounded up and shipped to other states. But a 2003 moratorium now prohibits the park from transferring elk elsewhere due to chronic wasting disease problems in other states.
The optimal size of the elk herd was again surpassed “several years ago,” Naylor said. The herd can swell up to 25 percent annually, but it has held at about 900 animals for the past three years, she said.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Republican Gov. John Hoeven have been pushing the Park Service to allow hunters to go into the park and kill the elk instead of using government-funded sharpshooters. Dorgan said the use of private hunters is the simplest and cheapest way.
“It is unbelievable to me that the National Park Service would even consider saddling taxpayers with a huge bill to hire federal sharpshooters to cull the elk herd and ignore the opportunity to use qualified North Dakota hunters free of charge,” Dorgan said in a statement.
Bill Whitworth, the park’s chief of resource management, said radio tracking shows that about a quarter of the elk population wanders outside the park boundary between March and November. The animals are able to leap over 7-foot tall fences that are designed to keep the park’s bison and wild horses in, and cattle out, he said.
The state Game and Fish Department already has increased elk licenses in hunting units next to the federal park to help deal with the problem, Hoeven said. The state will continue to push for volunteer shooters to cull elk within park boundaries, he said.
“We’ve said since Day 1 that we can help with this,” Hoeven said. “We have qualified, skilled volunteers—hunters—who would do a fine job and address this issue.”
Naylor said the Park Service does not have a timeline for picking a culling method. She said nothing would be done with the overpopulated elk for at least another year.
“It’s hard to predict,” Naylor said. “If there are only six comments, it will go much faster than if there are 6,000.”
The Park Service also does not have a favorite option, she said.
“We don’t have one we’re leaning toward—we never have,” Naylor said.
The agency will pick its final plan “partially on the comments we receive,” Naylor said.
“This is not a vote—it will be based on substantive comments based on the alternatives,” she said.
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