The Elk Cow
Summer, 2003 through Winter, 2004: This is where the story takes a turn....
In the summer of 2003, the elk cow was injured, maybe by a car or a dog. One of her back knees was extremely swollen, and it seemed she could barely put weight on it. She had this injury the whole summer and seemed to be coping with it reasonably well, but it also showed no signs of getting better. Towards the end of the summer she was reported by a neighbor to have been found dead, almost certainly killed by a mountain lion that had been spotted a few times in the neighborhood.
In fact, the neighbor also said the calf was killed. However, we saw her a short time after that report. Perhaps the person who reported that actually saw a dead deer, maybe near the elk cow's body, and thought it was the calf?
It seems clear that it is true that the elk cow was killed, however. After all, she was injured, so she would have been attractive to a predator. She has not been seen since. In past years, she always took her calf of that year home with her, back to the herd, and returned the next year to give birth to a new calf. Last year, her calf stayed through the winter. We saw her from time to time, although I was never able to get a good photograph until Spring.
The elk calf is apparently a female - no signs of maleness, at least. And, since she seems destined to stay here, at least for a while, that seems a good thing. We imagine that a bull elk without a herd would be a problem.
The good news is that, after losing her mother, the elk calf latched on to a herd (or herds) of Mule Deer. She is always seen at least near, and usually amongst, a herd of deer. Occasionally we have seen her trying to catch up with the herd. One day we saw her wandering in a ravine, bleating the way she did when she was little and looking for her mother. Then she charged about a 1/4 mile across a hillside, at a full gallop. We weren't sure what she was doing, until we saw that she was headed for a small herd of deer on the other end of the hillside. When she reached them, she stopped running and began grazing amongst them. She had found her people. ;-)
So now we have a new elk cow. And there are more pictures, so keep clicking.
