I had the funnest day, out in the woods, in my life. I don't know if it gets any better than this. I have been an AHE hunter for the past 5 years, and it has given me opportunities that most would jump at, but few will ever experience, and this was certainly one of them.

Every five years the WDFW requires AHE graduates to complete another 12 hours of projects, so I called the Bios at region 6 to see what projects they had available. I got in touch with a bio who is a family friend, Max, and he said there was an upcoming elk project. We would be darting elk, taking some readings like temp, blood samples, and then applying radio collars to a number of cows, and maybe some bulls. I said "count me in".

Our goal for today was to dart and collar 7 cows, and if we had a chance, dart a few bulls. We successfully achieved our goals.

Lets start off with a few of the tools. The most important tool we had was this.

A Bell Jet Ranger III. The pilot was great, and put on an awesome show for us as we waited our turn to process the elk. He would fly over head, at about 200 feet or so, scanning the clearcuts for elk. Once the dart team located some “subjects”, he would drop down for the sh-ooter to make a shot, then head back up to steer the darted “subject” away from the jack firs and deep timber by corralling them into the open.

These are a few shots some of the other tools we used.

These are the two 32 gauge, yes, 32 gauge rifles the sh-ooters used.


Here are some of the pre-loaded darts, and assorted gear.


This is a shot of cow#5 with a dart still attached.


For some of the elk, we had a special “pill”. The next time you think ibuprofen are hard to swallow, remember this.


This is a “pill” being “swallowed” with assistance. The pill is actually placed in the rumen so the elk can’t regurgitate it.


I had a chance to be in on three separate elk processings. We took the temperature (you don’t want to know where), usually about 100.8 degrees F, measured the girth of the animal around the chest (this cow was the biggest at 171cm), collected a sample of blood and stool, checked cows for pregnancy, administered shots of antibiotics and vitamin B to combat the stress of the darting process, placed a radio collar on them, and a few other things. We had two researchers with us who had this ultrasound device loaded into a full size backpack. They used it to measure the fat content and overall condition of the elk.

Continued next post...