Absent any real predators, the animal’s population has exploded: The state is now home to 13,000 elk and counting, all clustered in the 16 counties of coal country. Since then, Kentucky elk have been closely monitored by researchers like Mr. Ledford’s land was constructed, 4,000 people gathered on the grassy slope of a reclaimed mine in Perry County as Governor Patton threw open the doors of a trailer and an elk stepped foot on Kentucky land for the first time in more than 150 years. In 1997, a year before the bridge leading to Mr. Underpopulated and undeveloped, they offer ideal habitat for elk. Thousands of these sites dot the eastern counties of Kentucky. But the reclaimed mines remained, transforming previously uninhabitable mountains into something of a topographical patchwork quilt: long, thin ridges of stone and hardwood trees interrupted by sloping grassy plateaus. But when reclaimed correctly, the landscape can offer opportunities for different kinds of land use, including cattle farming, housing developments and sites for tourism.Īctive coal mines started receding from the region in the 1990s and 2000s, and the towns built around them faced an economic vacuum, with fewer jobs and deepening poverty. Some “valley fills” destroy headwater streams and surrounding forests, turning delicate mountain ecosystems into barren plains.
A number of studies have found that communities near mountaintop removal sites have abnormally high rates cancer and serious illness. Unregulated, the environmental effects of mountaintop removal-mining can be devastating and lasting. But often the steepness of a slope prevents this, so the debris is dumped into surrounding valleys and planted with shrubs, grass and trees, turning the jagged mountain terrain into a sloping plateau. Sometimes this extra material can be packed back down onto the mined land, forming an “approximate original contour” of the ridge. Using this method, the rock - shale, limestone, sandstone - is blasted apart and towed away by massive draglines, producing vast amounts of rocky debris. Farm owners did not want half-ton animals destroying their crops, and there simply was not enough land to support large herds anymore. There was only one problem: Each elk eats over 40 pounds of vegetation a day, and the grassland habitats of western Kentucky, where the animals were populous in pre-settlement times, had all been developed. The plan was popular more than 90 percent of state residents supported it. “Nobody in that short amount of time had ever moved that many elk. “All the stars had to align for us to pull off this project,” he said.
Gabe Jenkins, a biologist with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, worked for more than a decade on the project.
But it has a name - and a dramatic story - all its own.
#Kentucky elk hunting series#
On a bright morning early this spring, David Ledford sat in his silver pickup at the end of a three-lane bridge spanning a deep gorge in southeast Kentucky.
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