Elk populations in coastal communities are damaging property, moving beyond nuisance

Warrenton Mayor Henry Balensifer says elk are no longer just a nuisance in his coastal community. They’re actually damaging property and some seniors in the area have been prevented from leaving their homes as elk have charged at them when they attempted to go from their front door to their car. For years, a coalition of groups has been working on how to address this ever-worsening problem. The Clatsop Plains Elk Collaborative has been busy since 2019. Part of the Oregon Solutions at Portland State University, the project team includes the mayors of Warrenton, Seaside and more than two dozen stakeholders. Everything is on the table, the mayor says, including enforcing feeding bans, tagging and tracking, as well as culling. He joins us to tell us more about the plan and what happens next.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

COMPLETE - checked for spelling and pronouns

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Five years ago, we talked to Warrenton Mayor Henry Balensifer about problems with elk on Oregon’s North Coast. They were a growing nuisance at the time, a big enough issue that they became the focus of a collaborative solutions-oriented team project with more than two dozen stakeholders. But the problem only is getting worse. Henry Balensifer joins us once again to talk about it. Welcome back.

Henry Balensifer: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me back.

Miller: Thanks for joining us once again. How long have you been working on this issue?

Balensifer: I, personally, have been working on this issue since 2017 when the [then] mayor of Gearhart, Matt Brown, had approached me about issues they’d had with elk coming out of the woods and now into the golf courses. But the city of Warrenton has been dealing with this… this was on the radar, I guess you could say, as far back as 2012. But [it] didn’t receive a lot of serious traction at that point.

Miller: So early on in Gearhardt or Warrenton, or around there, what kinds of issues were people reporting then?

Balensifer: Well, Elk were getting aggressive during the rut and they were kind of overrunning the parks, they were damaging property. The golf courses, particularly, had difficult times with harassing them off the courses, and in general, it was very unusual. I had a town hall in 2018, and it was my most well-attended town hall to date. It was a packed house, and locals all said without any equivocation that 15 years ago you didn’t see an elk in the city. They were all in the woods, far out, maybe on the outskirts, Airport Hill, which is still outside city limits, or in the National Park. But they weren’t in downtown, and they were starting to make downtown their home, so to speak, and having unusual activities, so to speak. But that also came in with some more conflicts with humans. That was then.

Miller: Ok, what has changed? How much worse has it gotten in the last five years?

Balensifer: So there’s probably been a dozen dogs killed. In some cases, the elk will jump a fence when they hear a dog bark and they’ll jump into the fence, in one case in the Hammond District, the dog was on a lead and he wrapped them around the tree and then stomped him to death. In other cases, if they’re walking the trails, the elk will attack. We’ve had cars gored. There was a truck… there were videos that were circulated last year of a truck that was just driving by on the street, like any other truck, and the elk came up and put a hole in his door.

Miller: And so the elk… this doesn’t seem like quite the right word but, but [the elk] “won” that interaction? I mean, so charged a car and tore a hole through the side of the door?

Balensifer: Yeah. And there’ve been multiple instances where elk have either… with cars that were in a traffic lineup, waiting for the elk to cross. Or another case, again, last year, in a different part of the neighborhood, a cow elk decided to just mount a car that had been parked out for a week and went to town on the top and destroyed the top of that. There’s a school nearby and they have a hazing permit [required for any method of disturbance intended to move animals out of problem areas] from ODFW because they’re afraid that the kids can’t go out and play recess, because the elk will charge.

[It] depends on different times of the year. Now we’re starting to see aggressive elk outside of the rut, and that’s very concerning. We’ve seen elk charge and cause elderly people to fall. A lot of people don’t use the garage or the garage [is for] storage, so their cars are outside, or their house just doesn’t have a garage. And so they walk out to their car and, particularly senior citizens. They all seem fine and dandy until they take a run at you and then they can’t get back in time and they trip and they fall and that can be, for an elderly person, a broken hip can be very serious. It can be a serious life altering event.

Miller: My understanding is that some seniors in the area have actually gotten afraid, at times, of walking out their front doors.

Balensifer: Oh, yeah. At the mayor’s meeting, I get that a lot, seniors are calling the police to try and get them to move the elk or, just complaining that they feel [like a] hostage in their homes because the elk herd is outside there, and there’s no clear path to their car or just to even get their mail.

Miller: So, police have responded?

Balensifer: Well, I remember one instance, it was two years ago, police responded to try to move an elk and then the police are trying to get in his car because the elk charged the police car.

Miller:  So, is it both that the number of incidents of elk-human or elk-car interactions are increasing and also the severity?

Balensifer: Yes. In both cases, the population has definitely made a huge increase and that’s also got its own biological problems of having a highly dense population with a atypical diet, and becoming habituated to humans. The biggest problem is, as they become habituated to humans, you can’t just translocate these animals somewhere else and that’s gonna be hunky-dory. They actually seek out human habitations and that’s happened. There was a cow and a calf that got translocated out of Gearhart several years back, we moved them to this remote area called God’s Valley and within like a couple of days found itself into human habitations.

Miller: When you say translocated, does that mean sedated with a dart and then put in a big truck or van and taken to some other place?

Balensifer: Correct. But it’s not that simple. Unfortunately, that’s been a conversation that was, early on, collaborative. But because the range of Roosevelt elk is so limited, to just the coast, you don’t see them, basically, east of the Coast Range. You have a very limited area where you can put them and the population of those animals is such that there’s not exactly a lot of places that you could put them. And even if you did, once you tranquilize them - you can’t do it during a hunting season because they’re not fit for human consumption for 45 days, because of the drugs. But also too, it’s like $14,000, $16,000 per animal because they have to be screened and tested for chronic wasting disease, for all sorts of foot rot, all that kind of [stuff]. They have to have treatment and care before they’re translocated. You don’t just dart them and move them… and if you do bigger traps, then they become trap shy, and in some cases, if you trap them, they’ll actually die of the stress of being corralled and trapped. So it’s not actually very healthy to translocate them either.

Miller: The City of Warrenton’s population has grown by almost a quarter in the last 10 years. How much of what we’re talking about has to do with encroaching on what used to be elk habitat?

Balensifer: Well, I’m gonna challenge that as “elk habitat” because, Warrenton is the 17th largest city, by square mileage, in the state. But when you talk about growing a quarter, there’s still only 6,300 people. And there’s still significant areas like, for example, Fort Clatsop and Fort Stevens that are undeveloped.

But the other issue is that elk were extirpated off the Clatsop Plains by the turn of the century. So there was a point in time where they didn’t exist at all. And Warrenton was built on dikes and levees, so most of our town is basically diked lands. So anyways, the elk have moved out of the woods for whatever reasons and have found greener pastures and started moving into Gearhart, and moving out of the parks into the downtown areas.

And unfortunately, there was a period of time, probably 10 years ago or five years ago, [when] feeding elk became a big issue. We

actually banned it. That was one of the major things that we did to start trying to train humans was, don’t try to habituate animals to human food because they’re starting to eat things that you would never imagine elk eating. They’re eating rhododendrons, they’re eating ivy, they’re eating the plastic guides off the guide wires of power poles, they’re turning into goats in a certain sense.

Miller: You said that for whatever reason, they’re now going into more human areas. You have talked to biologists as part of this collaborative. It seems like one of the theories is that they were trained by, I would assume, well-meaning people, that they could get free meals from people who would feed them. But what are some of the other theories as to why they’re going where the people are?

Balensifer: Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of studies done in our area to answer that question, which is why Governor Brown actually designated it an “Oregon Solutions Program”, which is run through Portland State University’s Oregon Solutions Team. And that is what caused the [program] to get together with all the state, federal and local agencies and stakeholders. We do have OSU Extension and National Park State Parks biologists working and researching that, looking into the matter, but we don’t have a clear answer.

The conjecture at this time is [that] for whatever reason they’re moving out of the forest. Maybe there was a bad forage year or maybe a particular cutting operation happened up there somewhere that they moved out and they moved and found some green pasture down here and got into the golf courses. And they were like, “Hey, this is well-fertilized, open…”  People don’t realize that elk like open areas, if you’re gonna find them in the woods, you’re gonna [find] them in the clear cuts because that’s where the sun hits and creates the most nutritious forage. And so golf courses are open areas that get lots of sunlight and lots of love and care.

And then in Warrenton, they’ve become habituated to the area. There’s multiple generations of elk now that have known humans and in a way, I would say even feel like they own the place.

Miller: So as far as they’re concerned, who’s to say that they’re wrong? Based on their behavior. What has come from having this issue brought into the Oregon Solutions fold? My basic understanding of this program, which has been going on for a while now, is that for various contentious or sticky issues, state resources can be brought to bear and different stakeholders with different points of view can all come together and talk, in this case, helped out by folks from Portland State University. What has come from it so far?

Balensifer: There’s a declaration of cooperation. We’ve actually done the whole, “come together and find what we’re gonna do and commit to what we’re gonna do” phase, that’s already finished. We just finished that recently. So there’s a declaration of cooperation with every entity that’s been involved in this, declaring how they’re gonna cooperate with it. And this is huge. I mean, we started this whole effort saying we’re not gonna discuss “lethal take.” We’re not gonna discuss hunting. We’re gonna figure out, “how can we move this?” And then as we got further down the road, it became very clear that the problem was so large and getting to a certain point that we had to say, “All options are on the table.” ODOT is working on some innovative pilots to look at AI [Artificial Intelligence] to help identify elk on the roadways and to warn motorists before they run into them.

Miller: How might that work, using AI? And my understanding is that they’re committing half a million dollars to this project, how might artificial intelligence be a part of a solution?

Balensifer: So instead of having like just blinking signs that people ignore, that say there’s elk on the roadway. And then of course, you don’t see it, so you don’t care. We’ve had instances, Cullaby Lake was a great example, where a semi-truck barreled down on a foggy day and plowed through an entire herd of elk and killed 22 of them. And we’d like to avoid that both for the trucker safety and the herd safety. The goal of the collaborative is, “How do we peacefully coexist with elk, but have manageable populations?” And that includes human training and elk training, so to speak, or “management,” I should say. But the AI will help identify what the creature is, that’s the goal of it. And from there, warn motorists of them being on the roadway in those segments. We have already mapped [it] out. ODOT has been really good at dragging data and mapping out where the real trouble spots are, for elk collisions.

But now the question is, we’re putting more collars on elk, so we’re trying to map out more movement corridors to determine where the hotspots [are], both of where they’re going, and what time of year they’re doing it. And how mobile are these animals? Because the herds don’t stay in fixed sizes. They shed animals and they gain animals. They’re very social animals. So you might see a herd of 30 one day, and then 25 the next day, and sometimes 100. So, yeah, the idea is to identify the difference between the different animals.

The AI would hopefully be able to differentiate, say, a deer from an elk, they’re very different sizes. And that will help us track those movements, because deer don’t move in herds, and they’re not really as [much of a concern] for motorist accidents as elk are. You hit a deer, it’ll wreck your car, [but] it’s not gonna kill you, generally. If you hit an elk and you have a low profile car, you could be in for some serious injuries.

Miller: You noted that, in the past, people in the area were feeding elk. Is that still happening? Despite the fact that you have a “no feeding” ordinance on the books?

Balensifer: Yeah, I just got notice that we had ticketed somebody here recently, for feeding. There are many people who feel that they can talk to the animals or that they can… somehow they’re special compared to the rest of the population. And the elk do whatever… the problem is, it’s a wild animal, and they don’t understand human language.

Miller: That’s something you need to point out?

Balensifer: I do, unfortunately, and there’s whole Facebook groups. I know this because, in my day job, I’ve actually run into clients who’ve done this, and I had to tell them, “Sorry, you shouldn’t do that.”

Miller: But if they’re doing it in their backyard, how would enforcement work?

Balensifer: If we see it or we get reported to us, we identify it and we ticket it and if somebody wants to come to court and say, “I’ve seen that person do that,” which I think in this case we did, then we will do that because it’s gotten to a point where people were like, just letting people do their thing and, “live and let live.” But it got to the point where people didn’t feel safe walking in their own town because of how many of these animals now are present and seeing what feeding elk was causing elk to get more aggressive. Which usually would take some of these really beautiful bulls, they ended up getting put down by the State Police, because they were getting super aggressive. And people were like, “You caused this, you human that fed it, for your personal enjoyment, decided to reduce the enjoyment of seeing this majestic animal in our town because you made it aggressive because of your habituation of it.”

So people started getting kind of ticked about that and they’re starting to get to the point where they’ll turn each other in for it.  But, yeah, there’s a lot of well-meaning people who think that this is some sort of “Snow White” situation, and it’s not. You can’t speak to animals. This doesn’t work that way. And the other issue related to that, too, is that some of that food may not even be good for those animals.

But there [are] whole Facebook groups dedicated to folks to let people know where the elk are. And I’ve personally known people who have flown from as far as San Francisco to come and view the elk. And they’ll bring their dog and they’ll go feed it apples from their car. This happens mainly in Gearhart, doesn’t really happen in Warrenton. But there is the cottage industry of folks who want to share the elk. But it becomes a tourist industry and the problem is then you end up with a “Yellowstone” environment. Only people are, in some cases, more dumb than the “tourons” you see in Yellowstone.

Miller: Well, let’s turn from feeding elk apples to the opposite side of that spectrum. Which is now the possibility, which seems like it wasn’t really on the table before, of culling them. How widespread might that be, and how would it work, if that turns out to be one of the options?

Balensifer: I wouldn’t call it just straight up culling, and the reason why, is because…. like they did in Pendleton, they just did it one time, went out there and, “continental soldiered” them. In this case, we prefer the term “active management” because the idea is that you take a specific number, and we don’t have that number yet. We’re working with biologists to find that, to try to say, make a manageable dent in the population to get it back into a manageable number where it’s not as dense. But then also using the collars, using other scientists and studies, land use actions. “Elk corridor” notifications of property owners and other different changes. I mean, this is more encompassing. We’re actively trying to manage the population to a sustainable number.

Another concern we have is disease. You have a [too] dense population, and you get one disease, it’ll spread like wildfire if they’re too densely together. So the “active management” aspect will be that we will take a certain number… I think the number that we’ve kind of keyed into just as a spitball is like 50 to 100 from the Clatsop Plains area. Keep in mind, there’s nearly 1,000 elk at Clatsop Plains. So, taking a number and then seeing what the effect is, does that reduce incidences? Is that the area refilled with elk? What happens? And then reassessing as we go. So it’s not gonna be a hunting season per se. It’s not going to be - we have licensed professionals doing that kind of work or a management plan. We have yet to submit it to ODFW.

The city has to come up with a management plan which we have not yet done, to pitch to OSP and ODFW, and the police chief, to make sure that it’s both a safe and biologically sound process, so to speak. Not just going up there and, “Oh, that one,” you know?

Miller: Henry Balensifer, thanks very much for joining us once again. I appreciate it.

Balensifer: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Miller: Henry Balensifer is the mayor of Warrenton. He joined us to talk about ongoing problems with Elk on Oregon’s North Coast.

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