Elk with Collar’s?

Within Banff National Park you will see some of the wild Elk population supporting collars and ear tags. So you may be wondering why would they do this, are they pets or domesticated? Well they are very wild and this is done by the Park Canada scientists to track the animals and study their habits and life cycles. The collars have to be retrieved from its host at different points of time to download the GPS data. In one case the data has shown a female had taken less than two days to cover a straight line distance of 65 km. There are 240 Elk total in the Bow Valley, most around the Banff townsite. Many of the Elk do migrate in and out of the Park.

Wolves, Grizzly Bears and Cougars are also collared for the same purpose of study.

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