Volunteers and Wildland Conservancy staff come out for annual count of tule elk
Sep. 29—Seventy volunteers spread out into the wildlands of southern Kern County early Friday morning with one job on their minds: to document the number of tule elk that now make their home at Wind Wolves Preserve, south of Bakersfield.
One of those who joined Friday's effort was Dick Taylor, a volunteer naturalist with nearby Tejon Ranch Conservancy.
"It's an enjoyable and productive way to spend a day off, and at the same time to play a very small part in helping this effort to bring the tule elk population back up to the levels that it enjoyed back in the mid-1800s," Taylor said Friday afternoon.
Taylor was accompanied by team members John Trammel, Gary and Rebecca Peplow, Mark Duffel and Jesse Campas — and by the time they were done for the day, the team had spotted and documented 60 elk.
Daisy Carrillo, preserve manager, said Friday it was too early to release the total number of elk counted.
"There were 12 teams, and each team drove a different route across the property," Carrillo said. "We don't know our final count as of now. We need some time to process the data, make sure there weren't any double counts, things like that."
Last year's count was about 445 individuals, she said.
The tule elk is a California-only elk variety that came within a hair's breadth of extinction when overhunting and loss of habitat caused its numbers to plummet to as few as three in the 1870s, according to a study published in the Journal of Heredity in 2016. Since then, the population has grown to more than 5,000 individual elk distributed across more than 20 herds.
