OutdoorNebraska

48 Nebraskaland • December 2019 both trips. And then, the following January, he was gone, presumably for good. Young bulls often wander, and reports of just such a thing have come from many corners of Nebraska. A resident herd of elk can be found in the forested breaks rising from the Missouri River in eastern Boyd County 60 miles north of Sehi's farm. Nebraska Game and Parks Commission biologists assumed that's where the elk had come from, and that's where he ended up. But the next fall, the bull was back. As it turned out, the elk hadn't gone back north that winter. He was a snowbird of sorts and headed 13 miles south to Mike Dwyer's ranch on the edge of the Sandhills south of Beaver Creek. Dwyer didn't see the bull that winter, but a shed antler he found a year later told of his presence. Dwyer first spotted the bull less than a mile from his home while on his regular morning drive to check on his cows in early May in 2008. "The first time I saw it I didn't know what the hell the damn thing was," Dwyer said, noting the bull had already shed its antlers. Soon after, the bull left Dwyer's place and by summer he was back in Sehi's neighborhood. It was a pattern he followed most years for the rest of his life, heading south in December or January, and north again in May. "I still remember sitting on the road at our grove here looking to the south, and he was up in the hills running and bucking like a calf or anything else would when they're young," he said. When Dwyer spotted the bull in the winter of 2009, it was still sporting his antlers. He was in the same area nearly every morning when Dwyer went on his drive. When he noticed one day the bull had shed an antler, he went looking for it. "I didn't drive around too long before I found it," he said. When the elk dropped its second antler, he found it where the elk had jumped a fence not far from the first. That search continued each April, and he has four full sets and the single antler the elk dropped in 2007 to show for it. "It evolved into kind of a game between him and I," Dwyer said. He only found one of the sheds in 2015, but his boy found the other half while deer hunting later that year and surprised Mike with it as a Christmas present. "You can't believe the joy I had," he said. The bull frequented a tree grove on Dwyer's ranch that remained from an old homestead. There, he would set up a trail camera next to mineral tubs filled with cracked corn. The set provided thousands of photographs of the elk. He wasn't there every year. "It broke my heart when I didn't see him," he said. Sehi, who moved to Elgin a few years ago, said he usually first saw the bull in the corn fields in June or July. "He'd come out of the corn field and he'd have leaves hanging on his big antlers because he was starting to grow a new set," he said. "I could drive down the road and see his tracks every day." Sehi's neighbor, Ron Funk, who happens to be Dwyer's brother-in-law, saw the bull regularly from mid-September These trail camera images (above, opposite) were captured by Mike Dwyer on his ranch.

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