A Conversation With the Smokies’ Elk Guy

Joe Yarkovich is a wildlife biologist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and he’s also known as “The Elk Guy.” Since coming on full-time with the park in 2006, he’s been the go-to guy for the Smokies’ fledgling elk population, which has grown to a size of at least 150 animals since 52 elk were first released in Cataloochee Valley in 2001 and 2002. 

But Yarkovich does more than just work with elk—in the park, every wildlife biologist covers every area of the park, dealing with species ranging from bears to squirrels to feral hogs. 

What brought you to the Smokies? 

I was on a backpacking trip when I was a teenager and we stayed at Laurel Gap Shelter in the backcountry here. I bumped into a guy who was just going out to work at night with a shotgun. He said he was going to kill pigs. It kind of blew my mind that this was a job that somebody could go out there to do. Right then and there I decided, ‘Man, I’m going to do that someday.’ And sure enough, I was able to get an internship several years later here in the Smokies doing that exact same thing and work my way to where I am now.

You’re probably best known for your work with the elk, but what’s your favorite animal in the Smokies? 

Bears are probably the most fun to work with just because of their curiosity and their personality. My favorite work is when I actually get to work with the animals. So much of what we do is related to managing visitors and messaging and food storage and disposal that the times that you actually get to engage the animals and work directly with the animal—whether it be bear or elk or bats or whatever—the reason people like me get into this job is to be out in the field managing those animals directly. 

Are you working on any elk-related research at the moment? 

We have a really interesting project started now trying to come up with a regional population estimate. Probably the biggest question we get is how many elk are there. The short answer is we don’t know with much certainty. We can say there are at least a certain amount, but to get a better feel on that we’ve started a multi-year population estimate project. Sampling should start this winter. It’s a mark-capture study using fecal DNA to try and come up with a broader population estimate for the entire region. It’s been done with deer out west but it’s never been done with elk, so if this works we expect other states in the east to pick this technique up as well because most states in the east will tell you the same thing. They’ll give you an estimate but then tell you they don’t have much confidence in it. 

How has the herd grown and changed over the years you’ve been in the Smokies? 

The biggest thing for me was watching this herd become a successful, self-sustaining herd. Within the park the plan was not an introduction necessarily right off the bat. It was kind of an experiment to see if the animals could make it. In the early years they were having a lot of problems with bears killing the calves, so recruitment was a problem. They’ve learned how to hide their calves better, they’ve learned how to defend their calves better from bears. As an example of that we had this one cow from Cataloochee that the first year she had her calf in the field in Cataloochee, and it was killed by a bear almost immediately. The next year she was inside the woodline at Cataloochee and had her calf in the woods there, and it was killed by a bear. The third year she went 6 miles out of Cataloochee up on Balsam Mountain, had her calf up there where there were fewer bears, and it survived, and she brought it back down to Cataloochee after a couple weeks. Every year since then she’s gone to Balsam Mountain, had her calf there. And all of those calves in turn have gone up to Balsam Mountain to have their calves.