{"id":238216,"date":"2026-07-08T09:49:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T09:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/238216\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T09:49:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T09:49:24","slug":"pittsburgh-author-tracks-comeback-of-large-mammals-in-the-eastern-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/238216\/","title":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh author tracks comeback of large mammals in the Eastern U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

As a writer about the natural world, Andrew Moore has a pretty good idea what animals belong where. But several years back, a news item took him by surprise. Elk, it read, were being reintroduced to southern West Virginia.<\/p>\n

Wait, Moore thought: Reintroduced? These massive ungulates \u2014 mature bulls can weigh half a ton \u2014 once lived just a few hours\u2019 drive south of his home in Pittsburgh?<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn’t really picture this animal that I associated with the West in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t the half of it. As Moore learned over six years of reporting in the field for his critically acclaimed new book, \u201cBeasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America\u2019s Eastern Wilderness\u201d (Mariner Books), West Virginia\u2019s elk project was far from the first effort to return large mammals to their former home turf. And the story of each attempt was more complicated than many might imagine, even down to why the reintroductions were tried in the first place.<\/p>\n

From pawpaws to paws<\/p>\n

Moore\u2019s debut book, 2015\u2019s \u201cPawpaw: In Search of America\u2019s Forgotten Fruit,\u201d<\/a> explored the natural history and culture around a wild plant that resembles a mango but is native to Appalachia and has survived here for millennia.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/p>\n

Andrew Moore’s new book is “Beasts of the East.”<\/p>\n

\u201cBeasts of the East,\u201d by contrast, digs deeply into why these animals, once so plentiful, disappeared so many decades ago: mostly, because hunting, farming, industrialization and real estate development stripped the Eastern U.S. of so much of its biological diversity and abundance. And it examines latter-day efforts to restore three charismatic mammals: Elk in eastern Kentucky, bison in Illinois and red wolves in eastern North Carolina.<\/p>\n

Such reintroductions aren\u2019t new. Well over a century ago, an almost completely deforested Pennsylvania was empty of its own elk and white-tailed deer, breeding populations of which had to be imported from out west.<\/p>\n

That might be hard to believe today, when whitetails are considered a nuisance in Pennsylvania suburbs and cities alike and elk are a tourist attraction<\/a> in, um, Elk County. But it foreshadowed more scientifically grounded contemporary efforts.<\/p>\n

For elk, Moore documents, the first of these was in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, where a handful of advocates including a respected state Fish and Wildlife Commission member named Doug Hensley pushed for years to restore elk not for ecological reasons, but so people could hunt them.<\/p>\n

The proving grounds, ironically, were former coal mining sites that used mountaintop removal, where mining companies literally blew the peaks off mountains and pushed the rocks and soil into creek valleys so they could extract the coal.<\/p>\n

The process was (and remains) ecologically devastating. But it left behind flat, open land that, when planted with fast-growing grasses, turned out to be ideal grazing land for the elk trucked in from out West starting in 1997.<\/p>\n

\"Beasts<\/p>\n

The 1,200 elk brought in reproduced to the point that elk hunts began. Today, Kentucky has the largest elk population east of the Rocky Mountains, an estimated 10,000 head or so, several times bigger than Pennsylvania\u2019s.<\/p>\n

But Moore writes that complications abound.<\/p>\n

As elk numbers grew, the novelty of their presence in Kentucky dwindled even as the nuisance and danger of people living alongside large, hungry ungulates on the roads and in gardens and farm fields increased. After hunting began, the elk instinctively moved from open areas, where they were easy to shoot, into their more natural habitat, the secretive woods, which upset some hunters.<\/p>\n

Other problems resulted from the monocultural, often non-native cover crops originally planted to \u201creclaim\u201d the mined-out lands \u2014 and from the elk themselves, whose hooves exacerbated erosion and whose scat spread the seeds of invasive plants.<\/p>\n

The reintroduction\u2019s ultimate ecological balance sheet, Moore noted, remains to be seen, though the benefits seem unlikely to outweigh the damage done by the mining that facilitated the elks\u2019 return.<\/p>\n

‘Rewilding’<\/p>\n

Even the ecologically minded scheme to reintroduce bison to tallgrass prairie and in Illinois and Indiana has proved complicated in its own ways, Moore writes.<\/p>\n

The attempt grew out of decades of literal groundwork to restore the prairie, which had been decimated by decades of swamp drainage to facilitate agriculture.<\/p>\n

\"American<\/p>\n

Charles Larry\/\u00a9 Charles Larry<\/p>\n

A herd of American bison.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe tallgrass prairies of these states are the product of intense ecological restoration, some of the most intense and most rigorous work anywhere on the planet,\u201d said Moore.<\/p>\n

Advocates including the Nature Conservancy led the effort to \u201crewild\u201d the land, retiring cornfields and reintroducing \u201chundreds of species\u201d of native plants and even insects, Moore said. It was only then the rewilders realized they needed bison.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe grazing of bison in these prairie preserves opens up habitat opportunities for plants that need more sunlight and birds that require shorter grasses,\u201d Moore said. \u201cSo by bringing those bison in, it’s this quest to restore the full function of the wild prairie.\u201d<\/p>\n

While some critics opposed the efforts, compromises for the rewilders in a world of interstate highways and settled towns include the need to fence the bison in rather than allowing them to roam freely (as even Kentucky\u2019s elk do).<\/p>\n

‘Gunshot mortality’<\/p>\n

The third section of \u201cBeasts of the East\u201d documents the most controversial sort of reintroduction, that of a feared predator.<\/p>\n

Efforts to reintroduce the red wolf to North Carolina date to the passage of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service flew the first eight wolves to the state in 1986, and by 2011, the population had peaked at about 150, Moore said.<\/p>\n

\"Men<\/p>\n

Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources<\/p>\n

Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Resources workers release into the wild some of the first elk in a reintroduction program, in 1997.<\/p>\n

Then it crashed back to about a dozen wolves, in part because of what Moore politely terms \u201cgunshot mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Moore said the USFW is still on the job, and that \u201clocal landowners \u2026 are now more willing to accept red wolves on private property, as well as the vast estate of public land that’s in North Carolina.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if the fate of wolves in North Carolina remains uncertain, critical regard for \u201cBeasts of the East\u201d seems a little more sure.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal review called the book \u201ca magisterial work of natural history and reportage.\u201d<\/a> Kirkus, in a starred review, described it as \u201can exemplary work of environmental journalism and advocacy.\u201d And Publishers Weekly wrote, \u201cMoore\u2019s deep research and often cinematic storytelling reveal the power individuals have to shape public policy. It\u2019s an inspiring portrait of ecological recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a writer about the natural world, Andrew Moore has a pretty good idea what animals belong where.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-238216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}