Relocation Crews Round Up 150 Hanford Elk Helicopter Cowboys Find Success After Slow Start

The day began with vicious thudding from helicopter rotors as an airborne cowboy used the noisy, low-flying machine to haze 150 elk into a holding pen at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

By afternoon, under scudding clouds, the nervous thumpings of 16 of those elk shook George Howe’s livestock trailer as it groaned to a stop on West Branch Road - a gravel road cutting through an opening in the thick woods of the LeClerc Creek Wildlife Area in Pend Oreille County.

Volunteers like Howe were a key part of relocating elk from from a burgeoning herd at Hanford’s Arid Lands Ecology Reserve to the Selkirks and southeastern Washington’s Blue Mountains.

The Arid Lands reserve is a 120-square-mile, no-hunting area on the western edge of the nuclear reservation. It has become home to an ever-expanding elk herd, estimated at about 1,000 head, which has been dining on nearby cropland much to the dismay of farmers. The animals also destroy lichens and mosses important to the shrub-steppe desert habitat.

When Howe’s trailer door swung open after a four-hour ride, the elk weren’t in familiar dry sagebrush any more.

Seven immediately darted into the snow and sprinted for the dark woods a few hundred yards away. But the rest held back, even resisting the cautious prodding Howe gave them with a stick.

They were wary about stepping out into the snowy, woody land that will be their new home.

John Paul Driver, 10, came to the LeClerc Creek release site with his camera around his neck, ready to capture the elk as they lit out of the trailer. He came with his sister, Jessica, 7, and grandfather Don Driver from their homes on the other side of the Pend Oreille River from Usk.

Today it will be their turn to carry a load of elk from Hanford to an area near the family farm.

The skittish Hanford elk twice on Monday foiled attempts by a helicopter cowboy to drive them into holding pens.

Wildlife managers by Tuesday had doubled the width of the corral’s steel gate to 20 feet and removed a crossbar from the top of the gateway into the figure-eight corral.

“It was a much better day. Everything went smoother,” said Kathy Criddle, an information specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Crews hoped to corral 50 cows - many of them pregnant - and calves to complete the roundup of 200 elk today.

Some of the animals are being marked, tagged or outfitted with radio collars for tracking before they begin their trips to the mountains.

The long-term management plan calls for removing 500 elk from the reserve over the next three years. Without intervention, the herd could double in size every four years.

The elk are fertile, healthy and have few predators in the Rattlesnake Hills. The herd began with eight elk in 1975, believed to have wandered southeast from the east slopes of the Cascade Range near Yakima. They have flourished on the reserve, which serves as a buffer zone for Hanford, the nation’s most-contaminated nuclear site.