As far as road trips go, it wasn’t the greatest for a herd of wild Alberta elk traveling to their new home near Sudbury, Ont.
The 47 animals packed into two transport trucks were storm-stayed twice in a trek across the Prairies that began in Elk Island National Park near Edmonton.
Blizzard conditions closed highways and forced the elk to spend one night in Regina and another in Virden, Man.
The animals never left the truck, said Mike Hall, a biologist with Ontario’s ministry of natural resources travelling with the elk.
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“They’re probably taking the stress a lot better than some people who are concerned about this,” said Hall in an interview on his cellular phone Feb. 27.
“They’re gregarious herd animals and they take comfort from each other.”
The elk are part of a pilot project launched by the Ontario government to re-introduce wild elk. Herds were wiped out in the 1800s due to overhunting and urban encroachment on their habitat.
The two trucks arrived in Ontario March 1.
A previous elk relocation project from Alberta to Kentucky took five days “so we know they’ve been OK that long before,” Hall said.
The animals were fed alfalfa and watered throughout the trip, Hall said, and a local vet in Virden who checked the herd said he saw no obvious signs of stress.
There was a previous attempt to re-introduce elk into Ontario in the 1930s, but animals brought a liver parasite that killed off some domestic cattle herds.
