North Dakota national park elk project progresses

Superintendent Valerie Naylor says the western North Dakota park has finished reducing what was a bloated elk herd through managed hunts, and now it will monitor and maintain the remaining population using radio collars.

The National Park Service has contracted with an Idaho company to capture between 17 and 21 elk in the park's south unit and fit them with the collars. The work, which will involve crews in a helicopter netting the elk and biologists fitting the collars, is set for Wednesday and Thursday.

Elk are native to the western North Dakota Badlands but were hunted out of their range by the late 1880s. They were reintroduced to the park in 1985 and grew to a herd of more than 1,200, which park officials determined was too large for the park to sustain.

The effort to reduce the herd began in 2010, after a couple of years of debate over the best method. A plan to use volunteer shooters came about after former U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan and state officials objected to initial Park Service plans to pay federal sharpshooters to kill the elk. The special hunts, in the falls of 2010 and 2011, drew thousands of applications from around the country.