As a writer about the natural world, Andrew Moore has a pretty good idea what animals belong where. But several years back, a news item took him by surprise. Elk, it read, were being reintroduced to southern West Virginia.
Wait, Moore thought: Reintroduced? These massive ungulates — mature bulls can weigh half a ton — once lived just a few hours’ drive south of his home in Pittsburgh?
“I couldn’t really picture this animal that I associated with the West in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia,” he said.
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But that wasn’t the half of it. As Moore learned over six years of reporting in the field for his critically acclaimed new book, “Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America’s Eastern Wilderness” (Mariner Books), West Virginia’s elk project was far from the first effort to return large mammals to their former home turf. And the story of each attempt was more complicated than many might imagine, even down to why the reintroductions were tried in the first place.
From pawpaws to paws
Moore’s debut book, 2015’s “Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit,” explored the natural history and culture around a wild plant that resembles a mango but is native to Appalachia and has survived here for millennia.
“Beasts of the East,” by contrast, digs deeply into why these animals, once so plentiful, disappeared so many decades ago: mostly, because hunting, farming, industrialization and real estate development stripped the Eastern U.S. of so much of its biological diversity and abundance. And it examines latter-day efforts to restore three charismatic mammals: Elk in eastern Kentucky, bison in Illinois and red wolves in eastern North Carolina.
Such reintroductions aren’t new. Well over a century ago, an almost completely deforested Pennsylvania was empty of its own elk and white-tailed deer, breeding populations of which had to be imported from out west.
That might be hard to believe today, when whitetails are considered a nuisance in Pennsylvania suburbs and cities alike and elk are a tourist attraction in, um, Elk County. But it foreshadowed more scientifically grounded contemporary efforts.
For elk, Moore documents, the first of these was in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, where a handful of advocates including a respected state Fish and Wildlife Commission member named Doug Hensley pushed for years to restore elk not for ecological reasons, but so people could hunt them.
The proving grounds, ironically, were former coal mining sites that used mountaintop removal, where mining companies literally blew the peaks off mountains and pushed the rocks and soil into creek valleys so they could extract the coal.
The process was (and remains) ecologically devastating. But it left behind flat, open land that, when planted with fast-growing grasses, turned out to be ideal grazing land for the elk trucked in from out West starting in 1997.
The 1,200 elk brought in reproduced to the point that elk hunts began. Today, Kentucky has the largest elk population east of the Rocky Mountains, an estimated 10,000 head or so, several times bigger than Pennsylvania’s.
But Moore writes that complications abound. 
As elk numbers grew, the novelty of their presence in Kentucky dwindled even as the nuisance and danger of people living alongside large, hungry ungulates on the roads and in gardens and farm fields increased. After hunting began, the elk instinctively moved from open areas, where they were easy to shoot, into their more natural habitat, the secretive woods, which upset some hunters.
Other problems resulted from the monocultural, often non-native cover crops originally planted to “reclaim” the mined-out lands — and from the elk themselves, whose hooves exacerbated erosion and whose scat spread the seeds of invasive plants.
The reintroduction’s ultimate ecological balance sheet, Moore noted, remains to be seen, though the benefits seem unlikely to outweigh the damage done by the mining that facilitated the elks’ return.
‘Rewilding’
Even the ecologically minded scheme to reintroduce bison to tallgrass prairie and in Illinois and Indiana has proved complicated in its own ways, Moore writes.
The attempt grew out of decades of literal groundwork to restore the prairie, which had been decimated by decades of swamp drainage to facilitate agriculture.
“The tallgrass prairies of these states are the product of intense ecological restoration, some of the most intense and most rigorous work anywhere on the planet,” said Moore.
Advocates including the Nature Conservancy led the effort to “rewild” the land, retiring cornfields and reintroducing “hundreds of species” of native plants and even insects, Moore said. It was only then the rewilders realized they needed bison.
“The grazing of bison in these prairie preserves opens up habitat opportunities for plants that need more sunlight and birds that require shorter grasses,” Moore said. “So by bringing those bison in, it’s this quest to restore the full function of the wild prairie.”
While some critics opposed the efforts, compromises for the rewilders in a world of interstate highways and settled towns include the need to fence the bison in rather than allowing them to roam freely (as even Kentucky’s elk do).
‘Gunshot mortality’
The third section of “Beasts of the East” documents the most controversial sort of reintroduction, that of a feared predator.
Efforts to reintroduce the red wolf to North Carolina date to the passage of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service flew the first eight wolves to the state in 1986, and by 2011, the population had peaked at about 150, Moore said.
Then it crashed back to about a dozen wolves, in part because of what Moore politely terms “gunshot mortality.”
But Moore said the USFW is still on the job, and that “local landowners … are now more willing to accept red wolves on private property, as well as the vast estate of public land that’s in North Carolina.”
But if the fate of wolves in North Carolina remains uncertain, critical regard for “Beasts of the East” seems a little more sure.
The Wall Street Journal review called the book “a magisterial work of natural history and reportage.” Kirkus, in a starred review, described it as “an exemplary work of environmental journalism and advocacy.” And Publishers Weekly wrote, “Moore’s deep research and often cinematic storytelling reveal the power individuals have to shape public policy. It’s an inspiring portrait of ecological recovery.”
