Banff elk’s population has declined about 54 per cent in the last six years, with a healthy wolf pack on the hunt and a deadly disease putting a dent in the numbers in more recent times.
Parks Canada’s fall elk classification counted 123 elk in the Bow Valley between Castle Mountain and the east gates of Banff National Park in 2024, down from 156 the previous year.
Wildlife experts say that compares to 139 elk in the 2022 fall count, 171 in 2021, 212 in 2020, 249 in 2019 and 267 in 2018.
“Over time, what we’ve noticed is this is definitely sliding off,” said Blair Fyten, human-wildlife coexistence specialist for Banff National Park.
“We do know that our population is going down … that’s a 54 per cent decrease in population since 2018.”
That said, the cow-calf ratio was considered high at 57 per cent in the Oct. 30-31 fall survey, meaning out of 100 cows, 57 per cent had calves that survived from spring through summer and into the fall.
Fyten said the spring survey, on the other hand, shows the survival rate of calves over the winter.
“The winter time is generally when you lose a lot of animals, so when we do that cow-calf ratio in spring, obviously it’s always lower and shows you the survival rate,” he said.
“The fall survey shows us our recruitment rate, so you would think that this high recruitment rate at 57 per cent we would see an increase in our numbers out on the ground, but we’re not.”
In terms of the overall elk count during the fall classification, Fyten said many elk are likely missed in the ground survey.
“Each group has a certain area that they go out and patrol and count the elk,” he said, noting many get missed if they are deep in the woods.
“It’s the minimum number of elk that we have out there. It’s not our true population.”
Fyten said there were 16 known elk mortalities in 2024, but there are likely many, many more that are never discovered, especially those killed by predators like cougars and wolves, or from disease.
Of the 16 recorded mortalities, disease was the top elk killer at five individuals, while predation was the second highest at four.
Five dead elk were confirmed to have infectious necrotic hepatitis, which can be fatal.
“We’re definitely picking up some of these animals that are succumbing to infectious necrotic hepatitis,” Fyten said.
“Our most recent case of that was we had an elk in November die on the golf course so we know it’s occurring here.”
No cases of chronic wasting disease, a fatal brain illness that causes symptoms in animals including excessive salivation, drooping head or ears, tremors, low body weight, and lack of coordination, have been detected in Banff.
“It’s been detected west of Cochrane so it’s probably just a matter of time before it shows up in the Bow Valley,” Fyten said.
“When we pick up these mortalities out there, at the very minimum, we’ll cut the head off and we’ll take a brain sample that we send in for testing for chronic wasting disease,” he added.
“Every year we’re sending in samples of deer and elk and so far we haven't detected any chronic wasting disease.”
Wildlife specialists suspect wolves and cougars are taking a far bigger hit on the elk population than what is detected.
In September, a cougar hunted and killed an elk on the busy riverside trail on the north side of the Bow River in the Banff townsite between the Bow Avenue bridge and Muskrat Street pedestrian bridge.
The wolf pack has been active, too.
“Our wolves have been pretty active in the valley here and there’s been good numbers this past year, and past few years, so definitely the wolves are taking a lot more elk than we know of,” Fyten said.
The exact number of wolves in the Bow Valley pack is not known, but the last count at the start of fall had a rough number of six pups and between six and nine adults.
While the wolves entered Johnston Canyon Campground a couple of times, potentially getting food left unattended earlier in 2024, Fyten said there have been few incidents.
“The wolves have been relatively quiet for us for quite some time, since back in the spring when we had a few situations with them, but all summer, they’ve been relatively quiet,” he said.
GPS tracking collars were put on two individuals last year – a male and a female wolf.
Fyten said the young male wolf has been spending time east of Canmore of late, while the female has been roaming between Banff and Lake Louise for the most part.
He said a lone wolf was spotted on the Banff Springs golf course on Jan. 9 and a known female wolf was spotted on the edge of town in the Middle Springs neighbourhood on the night of Jan. 8.
“It was our well-known female but she disappeared pretty quick on us,” Fyten said. “That was late in the evening when it was dark, somebody bumped into her.”
The other known mortalities for 2024 were a combination of elk killed on the railway line, highways or drowned when ice gave way.
Fyten said the number of elk deaths on the railway line can be linked to snow depth.
“It really depends on what the snowpack is doing every year, like, last year we didn’t have a lot of snow in the valley bottom and this year we definitely don’t have much,” he said.
“We don’t see a lot of rail mortality generally when our snow levels are lower but when our snow levels get higher, and the elk use the rail getting from A to B, we tend to lose more elk on the rail.”
The number of known elk mortalities was lower than previous years, compared to 25 individuals in both 2022 and 2023, 38 in 2021 and 60 in 2020.
“In 2020 that was a bad one, we had 60. We had a lot of predation events in that particular year,” Fyten said.
“But they are down this year and I think that’s because we didn’t see a lot of rail mortality this year.”
The elk strategy for the Bow Valley has a healthy population target of between 150 and 300 individuals for ecological and public safety reasons.
The wildlife team may consider moving the annual fall survey further back from the traditional time of end of October and early November, particularly given winter has been arriving later with climate change.
Fyten said in recent years elk are more scattered and broken up into smaller groups at that time of year, making them harder to find and count.
He said last week, in early January, there was a group of 133 cow elk on the airstrip and 23 bulls in two other locations for a total of 156 elk.
“We’re thinking because of this global warning, do we need to change up our dates so we get a better sample size?” he said.