YELLOWSTONE'S WILD WORLD

Although it has been picking up in the park in the last few days, it has been rather slow in the last 2 months. The elk rut has been just about the only “game” in town. And what a game it is! There is so much energy that goes into the rut it makes me tired to watch.

I’ve always felt sorry for the female elk, and especially the babies. But lately I have been feeling bad for the males. They put an amazing amount of energy into the rut and that energy is almost completely controlled by testosterone. That is kind of scary to think how much control hormones have when you watch a big bull chasing a car at 30 mph or mating with a bush or watch one being tranquilized so the park service can remove a rope, a hammock, or a child’s swing from its antlers.

The rut has obvious advantages. It makes baby elk. But it also puts the biggest, toughest bulls in danger. And I am not just referring to the danger they face when fighting another bull, although that can be significant. The rut happens right before winter sets in. That has the advantage of timing the arrival of baby elk in the spring just when their mothers can find enough food to make enough milk to get an elk baby off to a good start. But it also means that the bull elk who puts the most energy into the rut start winter when they are not in top condition. Sometimes the biggest elk with the biggest harems don’t make it through the winter. Biologists argue that is to their advantage because one of the ways to measure an animal’s success is by looking at how many offspring it produces. The rare bull with a harem of 100 cows is successful whether he survives the winter or not. But there are some smaller males who are successful using a different tactic.

Some of the smaller males will hang around the sidelines and wait for a big bull to become engrossed in corralling his females or fighting another big bull. That is when the smaller bull sneaks in and mates with a female or two. That is not survival of the fittest. It is survival of the sneakiest. My kind of guy!
Two nights ago we watched one bull fighting a spruce tree. He walked away with a big spruce branch in his antlers. He didn’t like the extra weight I guess because he then spent several minutes dragging his antlers through the grass. Once he got the branch off he continued to “discipline” it by hitting it with his antlers.

We lost track of him for I while and then I noticed he was fighting with a cottonwood tree. I’m not sure who won that one.

We have spent a lot of time watching the rut in Mammoth and Touchdown seems to be winning the “King of the Rut” award. He spent most of his time chasing females and bugling, but you could almost always hear another elk or two bugling from a hillside or somewhere else in Mammoth. That had to take a huge amount of energy to remain king for a month.

We were getting ready to leave after the sun went down when I spotted the elk below. He walked to the south edge of Mammoth, just across from Liberty Cap. He looked back at the cows grazing out in the old parade grounds, bugled once and then disappeared over the hill. I am not great at identifying elk but I think it was Touchdown. He had dominated Mammoth for a month. He was the 2014 King of Mammoth. But when he was finished he just walked away quietly all by himself. It made me want to go hug him and say “Great job. Please stay away from the elk hunters so we can see you next September.”