Next time I put up a quiz, I'm gonna make sure I already know the answer.

There's 127 elk in the photo.

Melissa and Mayhem were the closest, with their counts of 128. And I think I know exactly why our counts were different.

In the top part of the mass of elk in the lower left-hand part of the photo, there is what appears to be a calf elk, staring up at the camera. Directly in front of and below a cow elk standing broadside.

Looks exactly like the calf elk about a centimeter to the right, also staring up at the airplane.

Problem is, I don't think the one in the center is an elk. If you look closely, the lower, dark part of its body is just the head and neck of the elk in front of it. Without that piece, this "calf" elk then looks suspiciously like a dark clump of sage underneath the broadside elk.

But since both Melissa and Mayhem came up with 128, not 127, I had to be sure. So I got out the next photo I took, as we circled in the plane, and began looking for an extra calf. Eventually, I set the photos up side by side and started counting them off, one by one, with little red dots.

No extra calf.

Now, the elk are always moving as we fly by, so it is possible that dark shape really was an extra elk calf, and that it just disappeared behind an adult in the second photo. But since what I'm after is the guaranteed minimum number of elk out there this winter, I'm not counting the phantom.

So it's 127 elk.

And no, Melissa, binoculars don't help. I may be slowly losing my vision due to aging, but the computer screen is quite clear enough without optical magnification.

Seriously, I have tried binocs in the plane. Once. Besides being totally useless to me (but not others, one of my wardens once claimed to be able to use binocs in a plane) because of the constant bouncing and jitters of a small plane, it was also almost a surefire guarantee of inducing nausea.

Usually what we do is the pilot tries for a quick count as we pass, while I try for photos. If I need a second pass, he will then get a count of antlered elk in the bunch. His counts from the air tend to be more accurate than mine although, compared to the photos, he tends to underestimate a little. His guess on this bunch from the air was 115 elk.

So, 127 elk. I can also pick out two mature bulls, and one that I suspect is a spike. But there are certainly others down there.

And at least 26 calves. Without an exact count of the number of bulls and spikes, cannot get a count of the cows. Therefore no good estimate of the calf:cow ratio, which would show us how quickly the herd grew this year. But with at least 26 calves out of 127 elk, it looks like calf production was a little low.

Don't have good digital photos of all the other groups we saw on Monday (got a few, though, if anyone wants another counting exercise), so we'll need to wait for the slides to be developed to see if I can get an accurate count. (Those I count using a 10X hand lens and holding up against a light... with a Hallowe'en pirate patch over the other eye to prevent a lot of squinting.)

But until the slides are back and counted, our best estimate of the count for the entire herd is 417 elk. My prediction based upon last year's count and what we took off last fall was around 445 elk, so we're close. You almost never find them all in a flight.

This in a herd where we have agreed with the landowners, BLM and general public to run only 350 elk in the winter.

Figuring we are going to get another whole calf crop added in this spring, and you can see what type of hunt we need to have again this fall. Plenty of "antlerless elk" permits to take out more cows.