In March 2018, fifty elk from Arizona went into a five-acre pen in southern West Virginia and waited. Federal disease testing takes time. The animals stayed put until May.
Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida was Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources for that delivery, and for the 35 elk that had come from western Kentucky before it. Over his tenure the state brought in 60 to 70 additional elk.
Two Sources, Two States
The herd was not built from one shipment. Thirty-five animals came from the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in western Kentucky, then fifty more from Arizona.
Genetic diversity matters in a founding population, and so does not putting every animal you have on the same truck. Restoration programs that source from a single herd tend to regret it later.
Restoration Is Mostly Paperwork
The romantic version of wildlife restoration involves trailers, release gates, and animals bolting into treeline. That happens. It takes about 90 seconds.
The rest is veterinary protocols, interstate transport permits, quarantine compliance, habitat preparation on reclaimed mine land, and partnership agreements with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and The Conservation Fund. Years of it.
Stephen McDaniel holds a life membership in the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. The partnership was institutional. It was also personal.
The Tour Van Was Too Small
Here is how you know a restoration program is working. People start paying to look at it.
The state ran 20 guided elk viewing tours in one fall season, between September 19 and October 20. All of them sold out within days. Two hundred twenty-seven people came, from Arizona, Florida, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Elk turned up on 19 of the 20 tours, averaging four or five animals per outing. Wildlife does not usually cooperate that reliably.
A Bigger Van
McDaniel’s stated obstacle to growing the program was not funding, politics, or biology. “To bring in more visitors, though, we need a bigger van.”
Twelve seats to 24, at a cost north of $100,000. That is the kind of unglamorous detail that never makes the press release and always determines whether something scales.
You can build a herd and still cap your own program at 12 people per trip because nobody budgeted for a vehicle.
Who Paid For It
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and The Conservation Fund were both partners on the reintroduction. Neither is a state agency and neither had to be involved.
Conservation at this scale almost never runs on one budget. It runs on a state agency, a national nonprofit with members who care about one species, and a land trust that can move faster on a property deal than any government can.
McDaniel has been a life member of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation for years. He was negotiating with an organization he already belonged to.
They Used to Live Here
Elk are not an experiment in West Virginia. They were native, and they were hunted out of the state in the 1800s, along with most of the eastern herd.
The restoration ground is reclaimed surface mine land, which turns out to be close to ideal elk habitat. Open grassland with forest edge, at scale, in a state that is otherwise almost entirely trees.
That is an unusual second life for a mine site, and it is the kind of thing that only works because several organizations with different motives all wanted the same outcome.
What Southern West Virginia Got
Logan County is not a place with a surplus of tourism assets. Coal employment has been falling there for two generations.
An elk herd on reclaimed mine land, with visitors flying in from nine states to see it, is an economic argument as much as an ecological one. The animals were native to West Virginia before they were hunted out in the 1800s.
Stephen McDaniel left the agency in January 2022 and now sells Christmas trees in Tucker County, several hundred miles north of the elk range.
The herd is still there. It is still growing. Somebody in Arizona is still waiting to hear whether they got a tour slot.