This seasonal closure gives wildlife a break when they’re most vulnerable. This is why the Land Trust’s Duckabush Oxbow and Wetlands Preserve is closed to visitors from December through April. However, the public should minimize disturbance in late winter and during calving. The Duckabush River elk are fairly used to being around people. “In September and October during the rut (the time when male elk, or bulls, vie for the hearts of their female counterparts) when the bull elk are most vocal, is an exciting time to see and hear them.” “Elk can be quite communicative with one another, calves and cows, but also the bull elk bugling,” said Murphie. Three particularly good viewing areas, according to Murphie, are at the mouth of the Duckabush River, under the power line corridor, or while driving along Duckabush Road. “They’re big, beautiful, wild animals.”Įlk in the Duckabush River Valley can be seen almost any time of year. The landscape where these elk roam is along a permanently protected wildlife corridor of more than 3,250 acres. He credits their growing numbers, in part, to the Duckabush River Valley habitat that the Land Trust and others have worked for years to protect. Murphie, who is pleased with their comeback, works as a wildlife biologist for Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) and has been studying the herd since 1998. Today, according to Bryan Murphie, their population has more than doubled. Just 20 years ago, the Duckabush River herd numbered fewer than 40. And one more common, but no less magical, sighting on the Duckabush is its herd of Roosevelt elk. In addition to providing important spawning habitat for endangered salmon, wildlife such as bear, beaver, and cougar have all been observed there recently. The Duckabush River greenbelt hosts many animals that have relied on this land for thousands of years. Nonetheless, one positive benefit to elk population processes was that the patchwork of burning retarded encroachment of woody plants into forage habitat and, thus, maintained a constant area of forage habitat across 43 years.The Duckabush herd of Roosevelt elk were photographed during a thunderous river crossing at Duckabush Oxbow and Wetlands Preserve by local photographer Artemis Celt. The lack of a substantial effect from burned area on elk population parameters might be from a variety of factors such as spatial and temporal variation in intensity of prescribed fires and weak density dependence. We found a slight influence from burned area on both r max and K but a stronger influence from precipitation during the growing season. We estimated Ricker type models in a hierarchical, state-space formulation that separated observer error from process variation. The highest count across surveys conducted in a year was our index of elk (females, juveniles, subadult males) abundance. We examined the influences of these predictors in a Roosevelt elk ( Cervus elaphus roosevelti) population studied across 43 years where abundances ranged from 4 to 322 animals and prescribed fires ranged from 14 to 891 ha of burned area in Redwood National and State Parks, California, USA. We examined the influences of burned area, precipitation during the growing season, and possible distributional shifts from a nearby public hunt on maximum intrinsic rate of population growth ( r max) and environmental carrying capacity ( K). But studies examining burning effects on large herbivore population dynamics while simultaneously considering other environmental factors that might also influence population dynamics are lacking. Prescribed fires often stimulate short-term productivity of grasslands that influences use by large, grazing herbivores.
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