Twenty years after being introduced to the Kleindale area from Vancouver Island, a 200-strong population of Roosevelt elk are either thriving or thieving, depending on who you ask.
The Lower Mainland Roosevelt Elk Recovery program has been "a wonderful project," said Darryl Reynolds, a senior wildlife biologist for the Ministry of Environment's Lower Mainland Region. The elk were imported in 1987, and immediately began breeding furiously, increasing their population by about 20 per cent per year in the Kleindale area, Reynolds said. Because of that success, the herd became a brood stock for elk repopulation in the Upper Pitt River and other parts of the Lower Mainland. Since 2002, the Lower Sunshine Coast population has been stabilized at 200, Reynolds said.
Frank Roosen Sr., 75, wonders why the ministry chose to relocate the elk to a farming area. A farmer in Kleindale since 1973, Roosen said elk have been a problem since their introduction, and have been especially bad this year. The large ungulates are nimble enough to slip by the vehicle in Roosen's carport to get at a carrot field, yet leave deep enough footprints to seriously compromise a dike built to keep seawater out of his two-hectare property, sandwiched between Meyers and Anderson Creeks at the north end of Oyster Bay. The elk sometimes wade through the ocean to access his land, he said.
"They've lowered the height of the dike drastically and flooded the field with brackish water before," he said. "It appears to me the Ministry of Environment is content to use Pender Harbour as a breeding ground for the elk."
While Reynolds traps and removes nuisance elk from the area annually, he acknowledges the elk have been unusually pesky over the last few months. "The colder and wetter winter has resulted in a higher snow pack, which has driven more elk into the urban fringe environment," he said. Twenty elk were relocated from Kleindale to the headwaters of Powell Lake this year.
Powell River-Sunshine Coast MLA Nicholas Simons questions whether the relocation policy is enough. He told Roosen in late March he would try to address the issue with Minister of Agriculture and Lands Pat Bell. "If everything's being followed according to the policy, and this is the result, we have to see if the program is able to meet its mandate," said Simons. A fence erected at Ministry of Highways expense between the Pender Harbour Golf Club and Highway 101 in 1999 shows there's a precedent for action to be taken by the province, he said.
Safety concerns were behind the ministry's action, after elk crossing the highway caused accidents in previous years. Jan Watson, a director and former president of the golf club, said it was up to them to fence in the other three sides at their own expense.
"I went after the government for help, but they wouldn't have any of it. So we spent almost $60,000 to complete the fence ourselves in 2001, or we wouldn't have a golf course," said Watson. Jeanine Ellingham, co-owner of the 16-hectare Mason Bluff Turf Farm in West Sechelt, has also spent thousands to fence in her property.
"These are no longer timid wild animals -they've boldly adapted to living near us," she said, adding elk hoof prints destroy turf, costing the business a significant percentage of their annual profits.
Government help is available, but only for those with commercial farmland as designated by B.C. Assessment. The Canada-B.C. Environmental Farm Plan Program covers 30 per cent of the cost for fences aimed at keeping pests out, to a maximum of $10,000, said Niels Holbek, the program's co-ordinator up until last week.
But fences aren't always enough. Mature male elk can weigh up to 500 kilograms, and Holbek has observed the bulls using the elk equivalent of a hip-check to break fences.
"I've seen bulls running at fences and hitting them sideways to knock them down," he said. "If they get hungry, and they like what they see on the other side of the fence, it's a big job to keep them out."
While hunting draws allow for elk to be hunted by bow and arrow within the urban fringe, Holbek said the B.C. Agriculture Council is now working on giving farmers the authority to sell elk hunting rights for their properties.
The program has now successfully reintroduced about 1,000 Roosevelt elk back in the Lower Mainland, and Reynolds credits the province's Habitat Conservation Trust Fund, which uses money from fishing, hunting and guide outfitting licences, as the main funder of the program.
While Reynolds maintains that "conservation and recovery of the elk populations is the first priority," it's evident the Coast has changed significantly since the elk were extirpated from the area by excessive hunting in the early 1900s.
"They're lovely animals, but that size of an animal can do a lot of damage," said Watson.
