25 years after they came back to Ontario, expert says elk population still not stable

A quarter century after elk were brought back to Ontario, there are concerns they could once again vanish from the landscape.

The latest provincial surveys show the herds haven't grown much since the original 440 were trucked in from Alberta between 1998 and 2001.

"For me it was a personal thing," said Josef Hamr, a wildlife biologist who was one of the leads on the elk restoration project.

"I was really hoping we could re-establish a viable self-sustaining population. It was kind of the goal of my professional career and to see it peter out is pretty sad."

There is some debate, but there are reports of elk being seen in Ontario in centuries past, before being wiped out by overhunting in the late 1800s. 

In the 1920s, the Ontario government decided to bring elk in from Alberta, placing them in several locations across the province, including in Algonquin Park and in the Burwash area, south of Sudbury, where they were in the same enclosure as some bison, which the province was also looking to add to its roster of wildlife. 

Hamr says most of the elk were slaughtered when the giant liver fluke parasite was found in the herd, but some in the Burwash area survived.

Biologists studied the descendents of those animals in the mid-1990s, and collared 15 of them. That included Hamr, who then got "excited" about the idea of fully restoring elk to Ontario. 

"It's a sexy animal," said Hamr, now retired from teaching at Cambrian College and Laurentian University in Sudbury. 

"It's large and it's majestic and for a wildlife biologist to get a chance to work with it was a unique opportunity."

Livestock trailers of elk from a national park in Alberta were trucked across the country, with 170 landing in Burwash, 120 on the north shore of Lake Huron, 200 in the Bancroft area in southern Ontario and a smaller herd near Lake of the Woods in the northwest.

Lots of elk have died in the years since, hit by cars, hit by trains, eaten by wolves and shot by Indigenous hunters.

The elk have become a major nuisance for farmers along the north shore and while they are not allowed to shoot the protected species, many have welcomed First Nations hunters onto their land instead. 

"They're not deterred by fences. They just break posts, tangle up fences, pull down electric fences. The damage can be quite severe. It's very frustrating," said Thessalon area farmer Peter Woolcott.