The drought certainly displaced a bunch of game (not just elk) this past year.
Not so oddly, I have also noticed elk hanging out on ranch pastures and hayfields for as long as I can remember. In fact there's a ranch nearby where they've shown up every year for the 20-some years I've lived here.
One recent interesting piece of elk behavior observed here in Montana by both hunters and reseachers is that elk are often willing to tolerate wolves on unhunted or lightly-hunted private land far more than the intense human hunting pressure on nearby public land.
