I was hunting the the foothills of the Sierra Madres in southern Wyoming a couple of weeks ago. It was during bull season and I saw a cow walk past me with a calf that looked to be nearly half grown. Then two days ago I was in that same area and shot a cow. I didn't see a calf but my son was with me and said he saw a calf run out of the brush when I fired, so I am thinking it was the same cow I saw during bull season.

From the size of the calf I saw earlier I assumed it would have been weaned. It was way too big to still have its spots. But when I field dressed that cow her teats were swollen and the milk bag was full.

A blizzard hit southern Wyoming last night so we just got out of camp in time, but I cannot help wondering about that calf. Not much I can do now, but do you people who know about these things think it will survive? How long after a calf is weaned will its mother still make milk?

in good habitat they'll be (at least mostly) weaned by 2 months (late Aug-early Sept). As long as the calf is near other elk and over 125#, it should be fine.

If it takes up with a group of adult cows and their calves, the odds of surviving the winter are very good. If it doesn't socialize with other elk, the odds are somewhat slimmer.

I'd agree with that last one... the calf will do something stupid to get itself killed if it doesn't find a herd to follow around. And that's exactly what it will be doing. The blizzard won't likely kill it, it'll know how to stay warm enough on it's own, but it needs to follow the habits of other elk so it doesn't walk in front of another hunter or predator

The mortality rate among calves the first winter can be high even when the calf is with the cow. It can be a dilemma whether to shoot the cow or the calf. Other elk will adopt orphaned calves quickly. Being part of a herd is more critical for survival further North, higher up, or during harsher winters.

To put it another way, I've read some results of a study recently that indicates that elk in the more mild climates tend to have far more of the loner elk that live their entire lives without joining a herd or joining with only 1 or 2 other elk. The point of the study was that in mild climates it is not critical to be part of a herd for survival.

The point made by exbiologist is excellent as well. Learning from other elk is also very important for the reasons mentioned.

Yeah, I figured if it finds its way to other cows it could make it. Even if it's still nursing surely it's eating grass too (?). I remember as a kid my grandad would have yearling calves that would still be sucking on their cow way after they should. There were a lot of other elk in the area so hopefully it will join up with other cows, but it didn't have much time. Lot of snow falling there now.

I don't know how many more years I'll have to live or animals I'll kill before I stop thinking about stuff like this. Probably never.

When it comes to antlerless tags I'm prone to killing the tender young of the year instead of a potentially 10 year old cow/doe. The young of the year are the most vulnerable to predation and winter loss, the old cow/doe knows the ropes already and has a better chance of survival and producing next years offspring.

If I had a choice I think I would have taken the calf too, but like I said I didn't see her before I shot. My son saw it run off. Considering that the pack back to my camp wasn't that close, if I did not have my son with me, that surely would have been another consideration.

Chances are pretty good that calf will do alright unless it can't get feed due to deep snow this winter.
I've seen here calves that have probably lost their moms to being shot form up their own little band and hang out.
A few years ago the roads were terrible so I had to drive the wife out to the oil and back everyday where we left here car. A bull calf everymorning would be sleeping right beside the car when we'ld get there in the morning. The weather broke and we never saw that calf again. Couple years later she shot a young 6x behind the barn. I always teased her that was probably that calf being close to his adopted mommy car.

Elk calves actually have a very low mortality rate, unless it is a tough winter and there are a ton of wolves. They are far bigger than deer fawns, have a more diverse diet, better insulating hair and longer legs to get through snow and brush. I see a lot of young calves on the winter ranges each year without mothers, especially after cow season. I would easily say that 15% of calves are motherless, but do just fine. Since elk are herd animals, the herd really doesn't care if the calves are orphans or not. The bulls are off in bachelor herds, so they don't pick on the calves. I often see the motherless calves hanging out together and romping around. If the calf elk still had spots, I "might" worry about it a bit, but again, they get VERY vocal and will find the herd and be fine. Even if the herd is a canyon away, they will find each other. They have the same migration routs and they are all very vocal and stink, so they easily find more of their kind. Flinch

Elk calves have a fairly high mortality rate, but that should not influence your decision on whether to harverst a cow or calf. As previously noted, orphaned calves will be adopted by other elk.

20% mortality during the first 13 weeks is pretty standard and that doesn't deviate much from one study to another. That 20% is during summer - well before the calves first winter. Even farm raised elk have 5% to 15% calf mortality. Winter survival is far less predictable and has far greater variance.

Also consider that even in those areas where the 1 year survival rate is considered low (20 surviving calves per 100 births) that is still enough in many areas for the total herd size to actually increase.

I shot a cow elk this year and didn't see the calf till she was going down. Felt bad about that, I would have taken the calf it I'd noticed it in time. My brother went back to the same area the next morning. Used a cow call and called the little guy and shot him with no trouble. he was lost and lonely. I was glad brother had an antlerless tag and was willing to help out. In my opinion shooting a cow with a calf is killing two animals around here - but we are on the very northern edge of the elk range and our winters and wolf predation are both pretty hard on big game.
We had an open bull/calf moose season here for many years, the biologist's reasoning was that to increase the population, breeding cows need to be protected. Many calves will not make it anyway, and like bulls, calves are far more "expendable".

20% is still very low in the grand scheme of nature. Deer mortality is more than double that. Big horn sheep, goats and moose are really high. Elk have one of the lowest mortality rates of any cloven hooved animal. They are very adaptive in diet and climate. The whole "herd" structure and body size doesn't hurt much either. Flinch

Our calf/to cow ratio in Western Montana these days is anywhere from 11/100 to 25/100. With these numbers we aren't raising elk. We're going the other way, and fast.

I'm not sure what our calf/cow ratio is, but our bull to cow ratio is 44/100. Sounds like we need to kill some bulls. what do you guys think is a healthy bull/cow ration? Sorry for hijacking the thread, just seeking knowledge. Tim.

44/100 in an unconfined population is pretty high, even a well-managed one. The competition means that most of the big-antlered bulls do the breeding, and the selection pressure is for larger antlers. I think that most game managers would be more than satisfied with that ratio. Whether or not the genetic potential of that competition is realized depends on the quality of the habitat.

It sounds great, but I have gotten excited about areas with high numbers of bulls before only to learn that most all of them were raghorns, margin bulls, or spikes. If there are antler point restrictions it can be tough to find a legal bull.
You should still check it out. Maybe you will have found something. Good luck.

50/50. The chances of surviving the winter are reduced somewhat. But elk are also herd animals, and so the calf can hook up with tolerant cow/calf bunches, and continue to "learn the ropes" of migration, winter feed, ect......



October is when the calves are at the end of weaning, but the cow will still have milk. Virtually every cow accompanied by a calf will have milk in her breasts if killed in October. But very few still have milk if killed in November. The lack of milk is unlikely to affect the calf's survival--mom has had enough of nursing by then anyway......


Casey

In unhunted elk populations (like around Banff National Park), 44/100 isn't high. We are just used to hunted population statistics--which are often skewed far from the norm.......

Wildlife agencies stateside used to think elk died of old age at 10-12 years, it's now been demonstrated that cow elk can normally live until 14, even 16 years old. Bulls probably don't live near that long.

So the average age in a hunted population is a lot younger than what would be "natural" in a unhunted or lightly hunted population. And that always begs the question how much does the younger age structure affect the physiological make-up of a population? How does it affect survival, breeding behavior, foraging ability, ect?


Casey

Exactly--it's all about age.....


Casey

Populations with "young" age structures are growing populations, for the most part, if the sex ratio is not too badly skewed one way or the other . Populations with an "old" age structure may be stable (in the absence of significant predation and with recruitment equaling mortality), or declining (i.e., recruitment is less than mortality).

I am not familiar with the data from Banff that Casey cited, but I cannot remember having seen cervid populations with sex ratios greater than 1:2 (males to females) that were not intensively managed to achieve these levels. That includes a lot of unhunted populations around the globe. All of the life table data that I have reviewed indicates that males naturally suffer higher mortality rates than females at all ages, but especially in the first 2 years of life.

I would be interested to see some population data for free-ranging elk herds with naturally high male/female sex ratios in the absence of hunting...

I agree. My point being that sport hunting tends to keep populations VERY young, and we probably choose to kill certain individuals that in a hunted population that wouldn't normally die so soon (ie: mature males for example) and skew male-female ratios, female-calf ratios, and age structure in a way that may have long term effects that occur over such a long period of time it may not be easy to detect. More like a slow "drift".




Our problem is almost all the data comes from hunted populations, whether it is sport hunting in North America, Western Europe, or parts of Africa, or moderate/heavy subsistance hunting like other parts of Africa or regions of Russia/Eurasia. Because large mammal populations are almost always the first to be killed when humans show up, there is very little data available to suggest what is "natural".

I've never seen the actual studies or population surveys from Banff, but have seen it quoted in other studies and popular publications.

I have a couple long time buddies who are/were biologists in the CDOW, and 20 years ago the common wisdom among biologists were elk in the Southern/Central Rockies only live 10-12 years. Then the Canadian biologists showed elk living a lot longer in the wild. Also, simply tagging more elk in recent times have showed some wild elk living a lot longer than expected--if they aren't killed by hunters, cars, or other "human induced" mortality. So that idea has changed some.

Casey

I once killed a cow caribou here on the Kenai Peninsula with an ear tag that indicated she was from the first re-introduction. If she was a calf at the time, it would have made her 23 years old....

She did seem a bit senile, but with caribou, it can be hard to tell.....

I don't recall anything in the moose biology that I have read that indicates bulls have a higher mortality rate in the first 2 years of life. Nor do I fathom why males of any wild ungulate species would have a higher mortality in the first two years of life. What I do recall is that if an animal (moose of any sex) lives to be a year old, it is likely to live a full life-span with bulls generally having somewhat shorter life spans than cows due to the stresses and injuries of rut when mature.

In comparison with a herd animal like elk, (moose are very social animals- but they like their personal space!) I would give an orphaned moose calf of the year very little likely-hood of surviving in this area, due to predation, snow depth, and the height of much of available browse. A mature cow can "ride down" taller saplings to get at the digestible twigs on top, a calf cannot, either from lack of learned technique, or from shear lack of body mass to do so.

That may explain something I've wondered about. Here in Wyoming it is illegal to shoot a moose cow with a calf. No such rule applies to cow elk.

I've only killed two caribou, but they were kinda' interesting to watch!




'Cause bulls are males--they tend to do more risky things

In mule deer, it seems male fawns are more susceptible to pnuemonia and scours, and more likely to die in that first year.

Suprisingly, bull elk during the rut burn/have higher energy requirements than a pregnant cow during the third trimester. If those bulls don't put that weight back on before the real cold sets in, there chances of survival go down quite a bit.


Casey

A few random odds and ends to add to the topic -

I have noticed that there are several elk mortality studies published (and more on the way) that concentrate on the effects of predation. This is no doubt in response to the increasing wolf populations in Montana, Yellowstone, and elsewhere. One statistic that was noted, and that seemed to surprise the biologists, was that the predation on elk calves by bears was higher than previously thought.

Elk live in such diverse habitat that calf mortality rates and causes vary tremendously from one area to another. My own personal rule of thumb when I�m holding a cow tag and facing the calf or cow dilemma is I choose the cleanest and most certain shot. It is important to know your own area. As many here have already attested there are certain parts of the country where it is always clearly preferable to chose one or the other from a management standpoint.

I�ve done some reading of Valerius Geist who mentions stream crossings as a notable cause of mortality in elk. I�m sure that is not true everywhere, but it is really applicable to the areas where I live and hunt. I do some data collection for the DOW and took the following photos while doing surveys.

This bull had apparently already shed his horns when it was somehow killed in a steep drainage filled with 10� willows. This drainage was also an avalanche run. Willows trap snow and in Spring make an unpredictable consistency with soft spots. If an avalanche had run that year it could have set up some very hard snow with soft spots � especially with a creek running below the snow. It is very possible that once he fell through he simply couldn�t escape the deep snow.


This calf lost its footing while following the herd across a snow patch on a steep creek crossing. This was in early July. I found it at the bottom of the snowfield. It probably broke something in the fall and the scene probably got ugly when the predators arrived and faced the cow.


BTW � thanks Casey for weighing in on this. You always have a lot to offer on these type of topics.

Last fall I shot a wet cow the 1st week of Nov. She had a calf with her and the 2 were 1/2 mile from a herd. The calf hung around for a while but by the time we were done dressing the cow, we saw it heading over the hill toward the herd.

The way the winter has been this year, calf mortality will probably be close to 100% in NW Colorado.

I stopped shooting cow elk.

Don't know if this transfers across species or not, but in the 8 years I lived in Kotzebue, the caribou would show up locally when they could cross the ice on Kotzebue Sound- usually early Nov, give or take.

The rut is in progress, or just ending, so the locals prefer to shoot cows , as the big bulls, anyway, can be inedible, and most all bulls - even the wannabes, have little or no fat either from actively rutting, or practicing for it. Eskimos have a thing for fat, and fat animals.

I found a lot of orphaned calve dead out there on the tundra.

They have a strong attachment to their mothers, and will often not go with the rest of the herd.

I once shot a cow on the edge of a herd of about 200, which then (the herd) ran off. As I was dressing her out, her (presumably!) 18 month old calf came back looking for her. She died too.... daily limit of 5.

Several other times I observed the same thing,- a not-of-the-year animal only slightly smaller than the cow I killed would come back checking on my kill, then take off back to the other caribou. The above is the only time I shot this secondary animal, however.

3 years ago, we hunted caribou off the Steese near Fairbanks. Either sex, 2 animal limit. I took my second in the fog, at about 15 feet; a calf, that was hanging around her mother's gut pile. Someone had shot the cow the night before, just as it was getting dark. I heard the (only) shot after I had come down the trail some time before, and the gut pile hadn't been there then.

I got maybe 15 lbs of meat off the calf, but I didn't mind burning my tag, as both my wife and son were there with tags also. Lousy weather, and we were a bit picky on cows with calves - we came home with 2 cows (no orphans were made), and that orphan calf.

The limit last year was one bull (declining herd) , which sorts out the dilemma! As does not seeing a single damned caribou....

Holy necro post

I sure miss Mudhen.