Reported by Bill Kelly, STATEWIDE Correspondent

[Bill Kelly, Statewide Correspondent] Bruce and Dan are hunting for elk. No guns this time of year. They're doing it with that giant antenna on top of the truck.

[Bruce Stillings, elk researcher] I get more comments, you know, is the TV reception good? Can you get HBO? Just a whole variety of those comments, yeah.

Electronic tracking of wild game is old news by now, but it's providing new information about the ever increasing elk herds that have wandered back to Nebraska's rugged Pine Ridge.

[Stillings] They typically spend about 7 to 10 days in a certain area. They'll range a mile, two miles within that area, and then after that 7 to 10 days, they might move four or five miles and go through the same pattern.

Teams from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are doing the legwork. Additional funding comes from Nebraska Game and Parks and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. There's excitement about the return of elk to Nebraska. During the first part of this century, they were overhunted. Not a single elk remained. Slowly they returned in the 1960's and 1970's, until they began breeding much more quickly and making a home in northwest Nebraska.

[Gary Schlichtemeier, Nebraska Game & Parks game specialist] A species that wants to increase. An any time in this day and age when you have a species of wildlife that wants to increase, you want to help it so that's why we felt we needed this project.

Gary Schlichtemeier is a game specialist for Game and Parks in the panhandle. He says growth in the elk herd was moving faster than the state's knowledge of the animals.

[Schlichtemeier] If you take pheasants or you take deer, we've got years and years of information on them that we have done over many, many years and so we have a backlog of information that we can apply and we can use for mailing. We don't have that on elk because we really haven't gotten into the management of elk up until just a couple of years.

Now management has become a necessity. The elk population may top 200. The mechanics of tracking are pretty basic. Every day the trackers head out to sites they know the animals are likely to be. Spread out in two areas about 40 square miles each are 10 cows wearing collars with radio transmitters.

[Stillings] Each radio caller cow has its own frequency and that's the way you tell which collared cow you are locating. And you can hear that beep right there, that means that's the direction she's at.

So what direction is she off in?

[Stillings] She'll be at 310 degrees from this location.

Bruce knows the exact bearings of the truck because Dan used a compass to orient a map and equipment. You get a rough position of the elk by continually moving the antenna on top of the truck. The stronger the signal, the more accurate the directional reading.

[Stillings] Then we'll go ahead and set our protractor inside to the position the truck is, and we can determine from that selected position what degree that animal is.

To get appear exact reading darn near down to an inch, they quickly move to a second location roughly at a right angle from the first sighting. Again they listen for a signal either using the truck's antenna or a handheld model to get even closer to the herd. Using basic geometry, triangulation it's called, they can figure the distance and location of the collared animal with a quick math calculation.

[Stillings] You have the collar number and the frequency, the location that your bearing was taken, the degrees at that location, the time, and then the sensitivity of the signal.

All the readings go on paper but they still had not actually seen this elk. That's the beauty of the electronics. They know when the cow is out there, and they know when she moves. Now and then they do get sightings. They call them visuals that reinforce what the high tech stuff is telling them. It happened earlier in the day.

[Stillings] This morning we observed collar 20 with two cows and two bulls.

Again every detail is recorded.

[Stillings] We will record the day, the time, location, number of animals associated within the group, collar numbers associated within the herd of elk, and any feeding and other pertinent information that can be observed.

Why do they move? Do you have any idea why they move after staying in one place for a while?

[Stillings] Well, basically looking for food, security, away from disturbance, away from predators. Just basically looking for a good spot to cool down in the day and have a good feeding spot at night.

It may be too early to say that there are any surprising conclusions with one exception.

[Stillings] It was once thought that these animals were migrating back and forth to Wyoming so did we have a migratory herd going back and forth? Does Wyoming and Nebraska have to be concerned with managing this population? And we're finding that it's not a non-migratory herd.

They're staying close to Nebraska.

[Stillings] They're sticking right in the Pine Ridge northwest Nebraska.

Back in Lincoln the data will be analyzed, computerized, scrutinized.

[Scott Hyngstrom, UNL associate professor] We really didn't know much about elk before going into this so we're building the basics for information and knowledge about elk in the Ridge.

Scott Hygnstrom is the associate professor at UNL overseeing the project.

[Hyngstrom] We wanted to find out the distribution of elk across the Ridge. We wanted to get some sense of the population, size, you know, how many elk are there in the Ridge. That's the most frequently asked question out there. Also relative to the distribution, how much time do elk spend on private land versus public land? What kind of problems do they get in when they're spending time on private land?

Hygnstrom and a team of students will put all the tracking collar information into a computer program that will literally map the movement of each elk with a collar. The calves and the herds over at least a three-year period promises to be amazingly detailed information.

[Hyngstrom] What we're trying to analyze depends on what the elk is actually hiding for. Is it thermal cover or is it for actual protection like having a calf?

With the particulars still to come, one thing is clear, the small roaming band of elk wandering around the hills and ranchlands of Pine Ridge have some different lifestyles than those in the wipe open spaces of Wyoming and Colorado.

[Hyngstrom] The elk do behave differently. For one thing in Colorado, Utah, et cetera, you're dealing with a situation with primarily public land. Elk have a large landscape and land is maybe 60 to 80% public. Where here in Nebraska, you know, statewide you're at about 98% private land. In the Pine Ridge there's more public land.

It may be the state of Nebraska that manages the herd but in the deep blue light of dawn, you can see these elk eating the hay of a private rancher. Hay belonging to guys like Wes Pettipice.

[Wes Pettipice, private rancher] I think they run from the hills. They stay in the hills and then come back in here.

They came down here because of the hay that Wes put out for his cattle each winter. In the winter the elk need food, too, so they feasted on the hay met for the cattle until the fence went up. Do you have any idea if this wasn't here how much the elk would end up eating?

[Pettipice] A lot. A terrible lot.

Do they eat that much?

[Pettipice] A year, they sure do.

As the elk move across both state-owned parkland and private ranches, the size of the herd when they move and how much they eat can have a tremendous impact. It's up to the State of Nebraska to manage the herd in a way that minimizes the impact on private landowners.

[Dale Anderson, Game & Parks critic] It's devastating when you need the hay for your own livestock and it's gone.

[Ron Thiesen, Game & Parks critic] You can't blame the animals. It's simply a case of how they're managed.

Dale Anderson and Ron Thiesen have been especially critical of Game and Parks approach to elk management arguing that a few private landowners carry the burden for encouraging the return of the elk. Even if they aren't happy about the elk, they like the research being done on the herd.

[Thiesen] I think having a good benchmark on how many are actually there with good scientific data, we all have a better idea of what we're up against and if nothing else we can see much money we're actually losing and go from there.

[Schlichtemeier] One of the reasons that we're doing this project is to learn more so we can work closer with the landowner so that some of the problems that elk create for him that we can come up with possible solutions that will be acceptable to him and acceptable to us and acceptable to our -- the people that manage the -- that pay for management of the resource.

Gary Schlichtemeier says Game and Parks is doing plenty to help landowners already. When we brought up the topic of paying landowners if elk damaged their land.

[Schlichtemeier] I don't know. Let's back that one off. Can we cut 'er?

In fact, the State is already helping landowners. The State pays for some temporary fencing around hay and in some cases picks up the tab, about $1,200 apiece, for permanent enclosures to protect cattle feed. That's how Wes Pettipice got his fence. Could you see them almost every night around here? Do you think they're that common on your land?

[Pettipice] Oh, I think they was until we got them fenced out of here and then they kind of checked things out and then they pulled out. I don't know where they went then.

It all points out for the need for raw data to create fair policy. Even with an ever increasing herd, the elk can be very hard to spot. The day we went out with tracker Bruce Stillings, we never were able to spot an animal that made his transmitter beep like crazy.

[Stillings] Yeah, same dang bearing as we had this morning. She hasn't moved a muscle.

That meant we got up before sunrise to try again. They were out there in the distance and very shy, but there's still a reason why people like the elk assuming they aren't eating your hay.

[Stillings] Well, they're such a large majestic animal. They're just beautiful. In the fall the bulls are bugling. They're just a majestic wild animal that's quite a viewing pleasure.

And at the rate nature has taken its course along the Pine Ridge, the elk are here to stay once again. For Statewide, I'm Bill Kelly.