You are driving through some of the best elk habitat in the Southwest right now, and if you are here in September, you may get one of the great wildlife experiences in North America.
Rocky Mountain elk are big — a bull can go seven hundred pounds and carry antlers with a five-foot spread that he grows and drops EVERY YEAR, which is one of the fastest tissue growth rates in the animal kingdom.
In September and early October they rut. And a bull elk in rut bugles — a rising, unearthly whistle that climbs into a scream and finishes in a series of grunts. It is a strange, ancient, slightly unsettling sound coming out of an animal that size, and hearing it across a meadow at dawn is something you will remember.
There is a conservation story here too. Elk were hunted to near-elimination in New Mexico by around nineteen hundred. The elk you see today largely descend from animals brought back in — reintroduced from Yellowstone and elsewhere in the early twentieth century. It worked so well that they are now abundant enough to be managed.
Two pieces of advice. First: dawn and dusk in the open meadows is when to look. Second, and this is the serious one — a rutting bull elk is a genuinely dangerous animal, and every year somebody gets hurt trying to get a photograph. Stay in or near your vehicle. Use the zoom.
And drive carefully at dusk. An elk in the road at fifty miles an hour is a catastrophe for everyone.
Photo: Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife · CC BY-SA 2.0