Elk eat grass and shrubs, and when the going gets tough they will resort to eating bark.
Elk depend on the lush growth of spring and summer to put on fat because it is very hard indeed to find nutritious browse in winter.
I'll tell you a story. The locale shall remain nameless, but the guilty will know themselves by their actions. A certain herd of elk found that the grass stayed green all winter in a special place that was in their traditional winter range. Moreover, the grass was extraordinarily tasty, having been fertilized and groomed almost daily by professionals.
The only problem was those little white balls kept flying around, which made the elk a bit nervous. Not nervous enough, though, to keep them out of this seeming elk-heaven. After a time, the fellows with the little white balls became annoyed with the stuff they were stepping in and the divots that the elk created with their hooves.
So, rather than schedule a cruel elk hunt to remove these elk, the governmental body concerned with such things bundled the entire herd into trucks and hauled them up into the mountains where they were mercifully released.
This was rather like turning a bunch of New York City folks who ate only in restaurants their entire lives out into the wilderness. There was two feet of snow on the ground and the elk did not know the country, even though other elk used the release area as winter range.
Before winter was over, every single elk was dead of starvation. The ravens ate well, however.
Merciful irony, don't you think? |
