LOGAN, W.Va. — Observers on the Tomblin Wildlife Management area in southern West Virginia have noticed a few elk calves on the landscape. Those born in the spring and early summer months of 2025 have been slowly emerging from hiding with their mothers. Unlike whitetail deer, elk are a lot more sneaky with offspring.

“They hide them a lot,” said Randy Kelley, Elk Project Leader with the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. “They’ll hide them even after we see a cow with a calf in the morning, you’ll see her in the evening and you’ll be wondering what happened to their calf. They’re probably hiding close by and staying out of the heat.”

The calves each year are vital to the agency’s efforts to grow the elk herd. Chances look to be slim of any more transportation of elk from other areas into the coalfield region to help the project along. Kelley, in a recent edition of West Virginia Outdoors, admitted that makes for a slow climb.

“What most people don’t realize is the plan was to bring them all at once or in a two year phase as opposed to spreading out three stockings over eight years. That makes a big difference. You’re trying to get over the hump where your mortalities outpace births. The smaller your group is, the more you struggle with that,” he explained.

Research has revealed elk from LBL and Arizona have crossbreed which is strong for the herd health PHOTO: Mark Bias

Randy said each year it makes it harder to make up ground when older elk start to die off or when a sickness might take hold. But that’s likely how things are going to be for at least the foreseeable future. The trend of transporting cervids has become very unpopular for the fears of spreading disease, particularly CWD.

“CWD is the big hammer over our heads. Until we get a live animal test for that I would agree. I think eventually there will be a reliable live animal test for CWD. At that point it may change the view of whether you can move animals, but you’re right nobody wants to move animals that could cause problems to your existing herd, but to your deer herd as well,” he explained.

The other big news regarding the West Virginia elk herd is the facts produced from a study by a WVU graduate student. He graduated this past spring after spending his time in on the Tomblin WMA and took a long look at some of the DNA on the animals. Kelley said one thing the study proved without question was the elk from the two different sources of stock are cross breeding. West Virginia obtained its original elk from the Land Between the Lakes National Recreational Area in western Kentucky. They’ve received a couple of subsequent shipments from LBL along with one very large shipment of elk trapped and transferred to West Virginia from the state of Arizona.

“There’s proof we have cross breeding between the LBL and Arizona elk in the subsequent offspring we’ve been able to produce. He brought a lot of good and very interesting data,” said Kelley of the student’s work.

“It was fun to look at who the daddy of a lot of these things was. It was not a surprise to us that a couple of bulls had dominated the breeding period, but we feel like we’ve had a few non-dominant males breed a few cows, particularly early on due to our relatively young status,” said Kelley.