News

A few years back about 1,200 elk showed up on the Heart Mountain Ranch. Prior to that, Brian Peters, manager of the Nature-Conservancy-owned ranch, had only seen about 100 head. Now, they were eating him out of house and home. ‘It’s been pretty devastating for us,’ Peters says.

Wildlife researcher Aly Courtemanch boards the Jackson Hole Tram not to ski but to study two Teton Range species: bighorn sheep and powder hounds….

You are tense and wary, alert to every rustle and snapped twig. A predator is near, you can sense it. Your heart races; you sweat. Quietly, you reach for a doughnut.

Writing in the journal Ecology, a team of scientists found that wolves in Yellowstone Park were not deterring elk from eating young trees.

It had been assumed that the presence of wolves would create a “landscape of fear” and no-go areas for elk.

A study of elk in Yellowstone National Park suggests that dwindling food resources may be one reason why females that migrate have fewer calves than those that stay put…

Across Jackson Lake from the Lizard Creek Campground, we stash our canoes in the willows at the mouth of Webb Canyon and slog through a marsh, periodically shouting “hey bear” to avert surprise encounters with any ursine inhabitants.

Though elk and other animals typically move from winter range to summer pastures to find better forage and to avoid predators, those benefits have mostly disappeared over the past decade for a group of migratory elk in Park County.

Field work concluded this week on a three and a half year study on elk and wolves in Northwest Wyoming. Biologists are trying to find out why migrating elk there aren’t reproducing very well.

Rebecca Huntington and Melinda Binks of Assignment Earth and This American Land produced a short video about our efforts to understand the influence of winter backcountry recreation on bighorn sheep in the Tetons.

Elk pregnancy rates are typically high – almost 90% on average in the Rocky Mountains – but we have observed low pregnancy for several years in a portion of the Clarks Fork elk herd that migrates annually into Yellowstone Park.