Reflections on the Wichita, Kansas Elk

On August 26th, 2024 residents of Wichita, Kansas woke up to an elk running around the east side of town. It was spotted about 6:30 a.m. at 37th and Rock among the hustle and bustle of people starting the work week. Between sips of their caffeine source of choice, a few lucky people caught a rare glimpse of historic Kansas. Two hundred years ago the golf course up the road or the majestic State Highway 96 didn’t exist. People in the area stayed along the Arkansas River or Chisholm Creek a few miles to the west not hotels next to a Korean restaurant. We have no idea if a herd of elk wandered through on August 26th, 1824 of course but it’s not unimaginable. They lived in the transition zone between the tall grasses of the eastern prairie and the mixed grass of the central plains.

An example of Big Bluestem. This plant was eight to nine feet tall. Photo taken by auther

The tallgrass prairie covered over 167 million acres and stretched from Texas through Kansas into Canada and east into Wisconsin and Illinois. It was named for the tall grasses that dominated the landscape. Species like big blue stem, Indian grass, and switch grass reached for the skies. Big Bluestem grew up to 10 feet tall while the others were slightly shorter topping out around five feet. They provided habitat for animals big and small. Reverend Mr. Boynton from Cincinnati, Ohio toured Kansas in 1855.

The reverend described the animals he saw during an address to his church. The land was full of “countless numbers of buffalo, elk, moose, deer, and other animals” that find subsistence on the prairie.[1]  Another observer around Fort Riley (near Manhattan) said that “We have also considerable game, such as deer, elk, buffalo, antelope, turkeys, zuffles [not sure what these are], grouse, ducks, partridges, etc etc with any amount of wolves and panthers, while the rivers abound with fish of the finest quality.”[2] Today, it’s hard to see many of these animals on the landscape. Thankfully, it is not impossible.

                We will never see the grand herds of animals nor the sea of grasses reaching taller than the tallest human but we can see glimpses of it. In 1986, Fort Riley re-introduced elk to the Kansas tallgrass prairie. The herd steadily grew. In the last few years, they started spilling out onto the surrounding area. People spot elk on the Konza Prairie and within Manhattan city limits. Elk at the Sedgwick County Zoo were large, mysterious mountain animals to me as a kid and I never thought (probably naively) elk would escape Fort Riley. Elk, black bears, and mountain lions returning do present some challenges but watching these animals come back is thrilling. The Wichita elk wasn’t just a random animal wandering through the city. It was a time portal to the historic tallgrass prairie and our connection to it.

Sources

[1] A Tour in Kansas, The Kansas Herald of Freedom, 1/6/1855.

[2] Plaindealer’s Correspondent, The Kansas Herald of Freedom, 4/21/1855.

Coyotes!

Every evening coyotes bark, yap, and sing across the United States. City noise may drown them out, but they are present from sea to shining sea in every city and town living among us. Historically, coyotes only lived west of the Mississippi River and called the Great Plains, deserts, and mountains of the American West home. After Americans encountered coyotes, an all-out war began. Individual states and the Federal government wasted millions of dollars trying to eradicate them. The Euro-American assault on canine predators began with wolves, and we transferred that hatred to coyotes. However, coyotes are an almost perfect animal to withstand the onslaught, and they thrived while people extirpated wolves from most of their range.

Europeans viewed wolves as an enemy to “civilizing” the New World. Two years after the foundation of Massasschutes Bay Colony, they enacted the first bounty on wolves in 1630. Massasschutes wanted to encourage people to kill wolves, and the plan worked. By the mid-1800s, New Englanders had nearly eliminated wolves. In 1825 Missouri wanted to get rid of coyotes and used the same tactics that had worked on wolves. However, a few key differences between the animals prevented that. 

Unlike wolves, coyotes don’t need a pack to thrive. They evolved a behavior scientists call fission-fusion, which means they can move between being a pack member and living alone. Wolves, in contrast, need to be a member of a pack to succeed in most cases. Since coyotes are more individualistic, they are harder to kill off. We still dispatched millions of them, but a runaway coyote can establish a pack much more straightforward than wolves. It's not just escapability that helped coyotes survive, however. 

They also have an adaptable diet. Typically, they will eat small mammals that many people consider pests (it can be beneficial to have some coyotes around), various insects, and fruits and vegetables. Coyotes carved out a successful niche among stronger predators because they ate anything. Coyote pups listen to their parents about having a well-rounded diet! With this diet, they can live anywhere and flourish. 

In the 20th century, coyotes were pushed out of the West and always found something to eat. Depending on food availability and the number of other coyotes, females typically have between three and seven pups a year. They are born in the spring to early summer. When a new pair of coyotes find an empty area, they quickly repopulate it. That makes it incredibly hard to eliminate a coyote population. Song dogs have remarkable traits that helped them survive the onslaught, but that doesn’t tell the entire story of our failure to control coyotes. 

It’s hard to imagine today when a coyote casually strolls through New York City, but there was a black market trade for coyote scalps. In Kansas, for example, there were rumors that people across the state raised coyotes for the one-dollar bounty that began in 1877. Journalists would speculate about people raising coyotes whenever many coyote scalps were submitted. In Neosho County, for example, the Chanute Weekly Tribune reported in May 1913 that a man named W.F Wells discovered a few people in the area were breeding coyotes for the bounty. The story also claims that a Sunday school superintendent had raised coyotes several years before. In five years, he made 50 dollars before a neighbor stole his 1912 “crop of scalps.” Missouri’s conservation department estimates that between 1936 to 1973, the state paid out over two million dollars in bounty payments on coyotes. Spoiler, there are still coyotes in Missouri today. Cases of bounty fraud may be rare, but they highlight the folly of efforts to control these animals.

Many Native American religions revered coyotes as trickster Gods. The trickster archetype is fitting for an animal that has been fooling Americans into thinking they can control nature for nearly two centuries. We have spent so much time and money trying to remove a species as American as apple pie. They have lived among people since the first humans arrived in North America and aren’t going to stop anytime soon.

Sources

Coyotes Raised for Scalps, Chanute Weekly Tribune, 05/09/1913. 

A Brief History of Extension Predator Control in Missouri. Dan F. Dickneite. University of Neberaksa 1973

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, Dan Flores, 2016.

Coyote Pup at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge, United States Fish and Wildlife, 08/1/14.