Thanks to careful stewardship and a renewed respect for these majestic creatures, elk herds have returned to the eastern hills of Kentucky, reclaiming the landscape they once roamed.
Story by Alan Clemons
At first light in southeastern Kentucky, the hills seem to breathe. Fog drapes the ridgelines like a woolen shawl, and the hollers — those deep, sheltering folds of the Cumberland Plateau — hold their breath for the first bugle of the morning. More than 4.1 million acres of these rolling hills cradle Kentucky’s six wild elk hunting zones, a patchwork of 16 counties whose topography looks, as locals like to say, “like a laundry basket dumped on a couch.”
Flat land is scarce. Elk learn quickly that the safest paths are the thin meadows tucked between forested spines, the slopes burnished gold in autumn, the hidden bowls where wind carries voices and warnings.
These hills are not the Rockies, but they are something quieter, more intimate — the perfect cradle for a species that once roamed the eastern United States in astonishing abundance. Eastern elk lived in these mountains and valleys for centuries, browsing from New England down to Georgia, even slipping into northeast Alabama. Their antlers — those tall, commanding crowns — once clattered against Appalachian branches the way they do today in western ranges. But two of North America’s six elk subspecies, the Eastern and the Merriam’s, would vanish. Kentucky’s last native elk was shot in 1847.
More than 150 years later, that story began again.
A New Era on Old Ground
The late-1990s relocation effort, led by state agencies, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, rebuilt what had been lost. Critics said it would fail. The land wasn’t “out west.” It wasn’t big enough, wild enough, or open enough for elk to thrive. They were wrong.
Grasslands left behind by mountaintop removal — flat, sunlit platforms seeded with erosion-preventing grasses — proved irresistible to the newly arrived elk. Controversial as the mining scars were, they created ideal feeding grounds bordered by timber: meadows for grazing, woods for shade and hiding. Elk poured into them.
“When we brought them in, there was a big boom in mountaintop removal from strip mining,” said Dan Crank, elk biologist with the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife. “They basically were converting forests into grasslands, planting thousands and thousands of acres of fresh grass everywhere, and the elk loved it.”
The animals flourished. Hunting seasons followed, carefully monitored, controlled by lottery, rooted in modern wildlife management. Today, Kentucky holds more than 10,000 elk — one of the largest herds east of the Mississippi.
However, as nature always does, the landscape began to change once more.
