Forest-owners fighting a losing battle against hungry elk
Saplings that have been nibbled by Alces alces will be good for nothing better than pulp
The sickly sweet smell of elk repellent 80 fills the air as Niilo Piisilä, the Director of the North Ostrobothnia Regional Forestry Centre, sprays chemical deterrent onto the stands of young trees he owns in the Salmivaara district of Salla, in Southeastern Lapland.
Piisilä’s saplings in need of attention are spread over an area of around 40 hectares (nearly 100 acres).
This means in effect that he will have to go around with the pump and treat something like 50,000 pine saplings.
Not many would embark on such an endeavour, since last autumn and the autumn before that, Piisilä and his brothers and sisters spent more than a week with spray-guns in backpacks, going around the family’s forests.
At the same time of year, a great many Finnish men and women would instead be spending their time going out with a rifle, hunting for elk.
“Yes, it really does get us pretty steamed up that each winter the elk come round and browse on the saplings. We’ve planted each and every one of them. Now they are around 150 centimetres high, and the elk are simply gobbling them up”, complains Piisilä.
Roughly 30 per cent of the saplings on the piece of land have been badly damaged by the four-legged visitors.
One method used to keep the elk away was pieces of soap hung on the saplings.
It didn’t work.
And there seems to be no guarantee that the spraying is going to be any more effective.
“We have so far come to the decision that we will not be planting any more seedlings”, adds Piisilä.
A total of 795 elk were shot last autumn in the municipality of Salla (which admittedly does cover an area of nearly 6,000 square kilometres).
Five years ago the number was around 400.
What happens when the crown of a small pine gets nibbled by a browsing elk

is that a new crown springs up alongside it, causing the tree to grow crooked.
In addition, the presence of herds of heavy-hoofed elk trampling through the sapling stands in the winter leaves a good many of them flattened.
In the winter, young pine trees are the main diet of elk passing through the area.
The damage done to the young trees does not kill them, but it does put a severe blight on their future value as sawn timber: the affected trees are good only for cellulose pulp production, where the return for the owner is appreciably less than if the trees were to go as logs.
In the areas of Central Finland where elk populations are at their highest, around a third of the young trees are affected in this way, reducing their value considerably.
Similar findings have also been reported in Sweden.
In Southern Finland alone, according to the inventories taken of forested land, the volume of sapling stands damaged or destroyed by elk like this has risen in the past decade from 240,000 hectares to 360,000 hectares.
Finland’s shortage of stump timber is supposed to become less acute in decades to come, since there are large numbers of young trees in the forests right now.
The planting of the sapling stands has been accelerated by the widespread felling that took place a few years ago, at the time of reforms to the taxation of forested land.
But now there are worried frowns: the stands of young trees seem to be doomed to become lunch or dinner for the elk population.
Last winter there were an estimated roughly 86,000 elk in Finland.
A few years back, the numbers were even greater - as many as 130,000 animals in the winter months. Even if the numbers are declining, many feel there are still too many of the beasts, and in any event the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s figures are generally agreed to be only an estimate. Some have claimed there may still be 100,000 or more elk in Finland, despite increased culling.
“The winter population is still too high. An adequate number would be around 50,000, and this would see appreciably less damage done to the forests. Even if the numbers went as low as 30,000, there is no danger of the elk becoming extinct”, says Risto Heikkilä, a scientist at the Finnish Forest Research Institute (METLA).
Heikkilä believes the density of the elk population should be reduced in such a way that there are fewer elk where the forested areas are also thinner on the ground.