For the first time in more than 150 years, an elk made its way into southeast Wisconsin. The couple that captured the moment received quite a surprise while checking their trail camera video.
“At first glance I thought it was a huge whitetail, but then I knew, no, this wasn’t any deer,” Nathan Heinritz told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We were freaking out. We were thinking ‘Is this even possible?’ I didn’t think we had elk here.”
The sighting happened near Hubertus, a small town only 30 miles north and west of Milwaukee, a long way from Wisconsin’s elk range. There are wild, free-ranging elk in two parts of Wisconsin – 175 miles to the northwest in Jackson County and another 325 miles farther northwest near Clam Lake.
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation provided funding and volunteer manpower to assist with the successful restoration of elk to their historic Wisconsin range near Clam in 1995 as well as subsequent follow-up efforts since then in the state’s upper and central elk range.
(Video source: Nathan Heinritz)