![]() When they do pick up that signal, they know that the collar is somewhere in that direction. They will tune it to the frequency that they're looking for, and then point this antenna in a 360-degree circle until they pick up the loudest signal. And researchers go out into the field, basically, and listen for radio collars with this equipment. The way that we monitor these radio collars is with a receiver and an antenna. Is this a population that is on the upswing? Are we seeing a lot of calves? Are a lot of these elk cows successful and having offspring? Or is this a population that's either stable or perhaps declining? All of these things can give us clues as to what we might need to do, to manage. That will help us predict what happens to a population. ![]() We want to find out how many babies she's has. Um.in an adult elk, we'd really like to find out if she has calves. All these things can really give us clues as to the health of a population. We'd like to find out, if it does die, what it dies of. We want to learn how long it lives, where it inhabits, what kind of habitat it prefers. So, what we use this for is to follow an animal around and determine its life history. This is.this would get much too tight, much too soon, and it would hurt the animal, so this is designed to fall off after six months to a year. The advantage of this collar is that it not only stretches-and you have to have a stretchy collar with a calf that's growing a pound every two days-but you also would like the collar not to stay on for life. There's the.what we call the "box," the radio, it emits its own frequency. ![]() This is a radio collar for an elk calf, obviously much smaller. And this animal would be called red-blue-red. ![]() They're often color-coded so that when we're just looking at an elk we can tell which animal that is. This is the antenna that emits the radio waves. This is the radio box and it emits a frequency that is particular to this collar and this elk. They don't look this clean after they've been on an elk. One of the best ways to monitor a wild population is to use radio telemetry collars. And we hope there's a burgeoning population. And, in 1998, 45 elk were captured here in Tomales Point, trucked about ten miles away to the Limantour wilderness area where they were quarantined for six months, and then released. The park is really excited about the relocation of elk from Tomales Point to the Limantour area, because the Tomales Point herd is a, basically, an enclosed herd, the park was really interested in restoring what is a dominant native herbivore to the Wilderness ecosystem. And those are all the tule elk that are left in the world. There are somewhere around 3700 elk left in California. And all of the elk that you see here, and in the other 22 populations in California, all come from those animals. In all of the state of California, probably fewer than a dozen remained. In, sort of, the late Gold Rush era, they were hunted to extinction here. We do think from the historical records that tule elk did exist in the Point Reyes area and they were extirpated in the end of the 1800s. These elk.although theoretically they could swim if they wanted to.they are pretty much, in practice, a fenced population. It is completely fenced in its southern border. On one side is the Pacific Ocean, on the other side is Tomales Bay. Tomales Point is a peninsula that juts up into the ocean. Tule elk were brought back to Point Reyes in 1978 when.ten animals-two males and eight females-were introduced to Tomales Point.
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