While Kathy Funk oversees the direction of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in Virginia, her role isn’t a full-time job. She’s actually just a volunteer. Still, payment has a loose definition tied to it, especially for Funk. Two years ago, money couldn’t have bought the kind of happiness she felt with the first release of Rocky Mountain elk into the state.
“Two years ago, when we brought the first elk into the state of Virginia [from Kentucky], it was a project I had personally worked on for about 15 years,” Funk said. “My father, Phillip Massie, is the one who got me interested into doing this.
“Years ago we were told we would never bring elk back into Virginia, that it’s not going to happen. We were told the game commission wouldn’t go along with it. We were told the farm bureau wouldn’t go along with it. They said, ‘It’s never going to happen.’ But we kept trying anyway.
“So when it did happen, that’s my paycheck,” she said.
On Saturday, the Shenandoah Valley chapter of the RMEF had its yearly banquet at Augusta Expo. Funk projected about 300 members from the local chapter and outside divisions attended, and nearly $48,000 raised at the event, which also hosted a silent auction and raffle.
Nearly $2.8 million have been raised in the state, which covers 120 acres, so far through the RMEF. The Shenandoah Valley chapter operates with almost an entirely volunteer work staff, Funk said, totaling 40. Over the last two years, Virginia has seen the elk population rise with two releases in Buchanan County, located in the southwestern part of the Old Dominion.
In 2012, the state stocked the region with 16 Rocky Mountain elk, the most comparable subspecies to indigenous elk since the early 1900s, Funk said. At the time, nearby Wise and Dickenson counties were also protected if elk wandered into those regions.
In 2013, the RMEF, in partnership with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, added another 10 elk.
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