Elk hunting wisdom
For a hunting forum, there seems to be relatively little sharing of hunting knowledge and hunting wisdom. There seems to be relatively a lot of discussion of gear, equipment, GMUs. These are important, I admit. I would just like to see more shared knowledge about the actual hunting. I'll try to offer something. I hope others ring in on this topic by sharing their wisdom.
Elk are generally herd animals and they congregate in relatively large numbers. Oh, maybe in herds of 25 to 35 or even bigger. This leads to important insights. As a consequence, elk can't locate in a place where there is only enough food to feed 2 or 3 or even 10 elk. They need to locate where enough food is available to feed 25 or more elk every day. That's a lot of food. Thus, don't hunt in areas where there isn't enough food for 25 or more elk.
Additionally, as a consequence of the herding property of elk, there is a whole lot of land where the elk are not. Let me say that another way. If a 20 square mile area is big enough to provide food for elk over a summer-fall period, at any given time the herd of 25-35 elk are only going to be in a small part of that 20 square mile area. It may be the case that a herd of elk includes 50 elk and may be located somewhere in a 100 square mile area. Once you find them, you find a lot of them, but perhaps more importantly for the hunter who doesn't initially know where the elk are . . . there is a whole lot of land where the elk are not. Finding the elk in that large expanse of land is the problem. They aren't equally distributed. And every square mile of that area is not equal with the other square miles. You have to figure out how to identify the best spots as a strategy for reducing your search area to a size that is manageable. If you know where to find the elk in advance because you know your hunt area very well, you are fortunate and can expect much increased probabilities of success relative to another who doesn't know where the elk are likely to be before the season starts.
There are exceptions. I understand post-rut, large bulls may violate this assumption. It is possible that, post-rut, large bulls are loners and can live in areas with small amounts of food available, since they only need to have enough food to feed themselves, not to feed a herd of 25 or more elk. Maybe the wisdom can be flipped around in this case. Being loners, the bull elk seek places where herds of elk CANNOT live, hence look for big bull elk post-rut in areas that offer ONLY small pockets of browse.
I don't know how valuable that information is, but that seems a step in the direction of revealing general "elk hunting wisdom." Maybe others can extract and share other consequences from the axiom "elk are generally herd animals."
I invite others to provide their contributions.