Now for your Friday Moment of Zen.
Point No Point Treaty Council wildlife program manager Tim Cullinan caught these adolescent male Roosevelt Elk roughhousing just south of Sequim during his regular field observations over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend.
“I was 100 yards away and saw these guys,” he said. “The one with the smaller antlers is actually the strongest of these three. His antlers just happened to have broken.”
It was hard to capture audio but elk make a high-pitched noise when they’re playing, he said, which is all they were doing. Nothing like the fighting like they do in the fall when they’re competing for the females, he said.
These elk are part of the Dungeness herd of the Roosevelt Elk population, which is native to the Olympic Peninsula. This particular herd consists of about 40 elk; Throughout the peninsula, it is estimated there are about 8,000 elk total.
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