Hunter kills wild elk on farm in S. Illinois
By Paul Hampel
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
12/06/2005
NEW MINDEN
Brandon Sachtleben sighted down the barrel of his 12-gauge shotgun and, for the first time since he began hunting deer, let a 10-point buck pass without firing.
Sachtleben, 21, was waiting for something bigger to come along, a beast whose raspy roar had filled the woods Saturday morning on his family's farm near New Minden in Illinois' Washington County, 55 miles southeast of St. Louis.
And then Sachtleben saw it - a massive bull elk. Wild elk disappeared from Southern Illinois in the early 1800s.
"He stood 3-feet taller than the white-tailed deer, who were behaving very skittish around him," said Sachtleben, a business major at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. "He was definitely in charge."
Sachtleben squeezed off a shot and the elk leapt forward, mortally wounded.
Illinois conservation officials confirmed Tuesday that the kill was the first known shooting of an elk in the wild in the region since 2001, when a hunter bagged one in Calhoun County that had escaped from a nearby preserve.
But Sachtleben, and his father, Doug Sachtleben, 39, a real estate appraiser, suspect that the elk shot Saturday was about 2-years-old and the offspring of animals that escaped a nearby preserve that closed down in the early 1990s.
If that's true, it would mark the first known self-sustaining population of elk in the wild in the region in almost 200 years.
"People in this area have seen elk cows and bulls roaming here," Brandon Sachtleben said. "For sure there are more out there, and they are breeding."
Within the past decade, Illinois and Missouri conservation officials have considered reintroducing wild elk. The plans were met with vehement opposition and dropped. Opponents claimed elk would be a danger to motorists, citing statistics involving crashes with deer.
Capt. Mark Ottis with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources said it is possible "that a very small, local population could exist."
"It would be the only one we know of," Ottis said. "They are an indigenous species but have not been considered native for a long time."
Sachtleben field-dressed the animal and had it weighed at a bar in Prairie du Rocher, where it tipped the scales at 280-pounds; he figured it weighed about 400 pounds before it was gutted.
A mature bull elk can weigh up to 1,000 pounds, with the antlers alone stretching 6 feet and weighing 50 pounds. Deer are maybe a fourth the size of an elk.
Ottis said Sachtleben's kill was legal, since elk are not a regulated species in Illinois.
"Legally, he could have killed it in July," Ottis said.
Sachtleben said he has hunted since he was old enough to walk. He plans to have the elk's head mounted for display in his efficiency apartment in Carbondale - right alongside a stuffed 60-pound carp he caught barehanded last year in the university's lake.
"My friends asked me then how I'd top the carp catch," Sachtleben said. "I guess just did."
