SEQUIM — The call could come in the middle of the night: a band of elk on the south side of U.S. Highway 101 is approaching the road, possibly with intent to cross.
You, a volunteer trained in behavior modification, must go out there and chase the beasts back away from the freeway.
So how did the elk get your home phone number?
They didn’t. Instead, they’re wearing high-tech collars that, if the animals wander too close to Highway 101 in the Dungeness Valley, transmit a signal to alert the state Department of Fish and Wildlife — and local volunteers like you.
If on-call, on-foot elk herding sounds like something you might like to do, an organization called Eyes in the Woods invites you to a meeting in Sequim on Saturday.
Eyes, which works with Fish and Wildlife on other land- and wildlife-protection projects around the state, is embarking this spring on a state grant-funded pilot program in the Dungeness Valley.
It’s called the Northeast Olympic Roosevelt Elk Project, and Eyes is collaborating with the state and with the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, which are the elk herd’s co-managers.
Its aim is simple: keep as many elk as possible on their historical range on the south side of Highway 101.
The Dungeness herd of Roosevelt elk includes a band of more than 20 animals on the south side, said Tim Cullinan, the Point No Point Treaty Council biologist hired by the Jamestown tribe to study and monitor the herd.
Crop damage
The tribe and state want to keep the elk from reaching the other side, where in recent years they’ve done significant damage to crops on the farms northeast of Sequim.
So although many local residents and visitors profess love for the elk — while metal silhouettes of them stand at either entrance to the city — state and Jamestown officials in 2006 considered relocating the herd.
That ignited public out cry, so an alternative was proposed: building an 8-foot-tall fence along the south side of the highway from Blyn to the Dungeness River.
In summer 2008, the co-managers met to weigh the fence option; one estimate pegged the price at $2 million.
Then came Washington state’s ballooning budget deficit, and a Sequim elk fence pretty much fell off the priority list, Cullinan said.
He works with Anita McMillan, Fish and Wildlife’s Sequim-based biologist, so “Anita and I put our heads together,” and pursued what’s called a virtual fence.
Employed by cattle ranchers in Australia, this animal management system uses collars with global positioning systems to track a herd’s location.
If the cows move toward land they shouldn’t, the programmable collars alert the ranchers, who can go out and herd them back where they belong.
Cullinan said he and McMillan won a $33,675 state grant in 2009 for an elk-GPS project, and arranged to work with Eyes in the Woods volunteers through this spring, summer and fall.
“We’re going to start out with just three collars,” Cullinan said. “We’ll try to get adult females.
“They’re the ones who make the decisions on where the herd will go.”
A few Dungeness elk already have collars — but not the GPS kind.
These are equipped instead with VHF radio transmitters connected to the yellow signs along Highway 101 just east of Sequim, so when a collared elk comes close to the road, lights on the signs flash to alert motorists.
The radio-collar program, begun in the late 1990s, is much less costly than the GPS system, Cullinan said, adding the radio sets cost a few hundred dollars apiece while the GPS versions are in the $5,000 to $6,000 range.
If all goes as planned, Fish and Wildlife staffers such as Cullinan would capture the three elk this fall, and Eyes in the Woods volunteers will help divert them from Highway 101.
Herding elk
Herding a 600- to 1,000-pound elk, Sandifer added, isn’t as perilous as it sounds.
“All they’ve got to do is see you, and they’re going to skedaddle,” said Jesse Sandifer, Eyes’ wildlife director.
Cullinan agreed, and said the time of year when elk may be dangerous is summer, when their young calves are with them. That is not the season when they wander toward the highway, he added.
Come fall — around November — the herd starts moving again, when the calves aren’t as vulnerable, “and by that time they’re not dangerous anymore. Their response to humans is to flee.”
Greg Scirato, Fish and Wildlife’s Olympic region wildlife program manager, said that after this Saturday’s orientation for volunteers, a formal training session will be held in Sequim later this spring.
“It will be interesting to see,” added Cullinan, “how much enthusiasm there is to do this in this community.
“It’s going to be a 24-hour responsibility,” to respond to calls for elk-herding.
Volunteers “are going to have to be really dedicated.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.