Owls Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind (45 page)

Although moose come to these salty places all through the warm months, they use them far more heavily in May. Why? Because the aquatic plants that supply moose with sodium and other nutrients haven’t yet grown enough that moose can feed on them. With moose heavily concentrated during May along paved highways, and cars zipping along these roads at high speed, it’s inevitable that collisions disastrous to moose, car, and occupants will occur.

Moose are especially hard to see at night because of their very dark color; often the first thing a motorist sees are the long gray legs, which show up a little better than the body. Moose love the accumulation of winter road salt that collects in wet areas beside highways, and this makes nighttime travel doubly hazardous along these “salt licks.”

Although it’s advisable to slow down when driving through moose country, especially at night, that’s no guarantee against a collision with a moose. I’ve personally known of several people who slowed down substantially because they were afraid of hitting a moose—and hit one anyway!

People often suggest mooseproof fencing along highways to prevent accidents. Proper fencing does, in fact, work very well, but it’s prohibitively expensive for all but very short stretches of highway. For example, in 1987, Alaska fenced a ten-mile section of high-speed highway out of Anchorage, where there were many collisions with moose each year. The strategy worked, but it cost $1.25 million just for that ten miles, and the cost today would probably be at least 50 percent higher. Clearly, fencing isn’t an option except in the most unusual circumstances.

A third serious problem is due almost entirely to human idiocy, which sometimes knows no bounds. At least partially because of the influence of Bullwinkle, the cartoon character, far too many people regard moose as oversized woodland bovines, placid, benign, and cuddly. As a result, they constantly put themselves in danger by trying to approach moose too closely—or even pet or hug them!

My files contain numerous accounts of people who have been killed or seriously injured by moose, as well as other examples of individuals who took horrible—and inexcusably stupid—chances and were fortunate enough to walk away unscathed. Evidently, fortune sometimes favors fools.

One of the most egregious examples concerns a woman attempting to pet a “tame” moose that had been hanging around, attracting crowds of spectators. A newspaper photo showed her reaching up to pat the cow moose: the moose, registering its extreme displeasure, had her nose pointed skyward and her ears laid back nearly flat, much in the manner of an angry house cat. That was bad enough, but the caption informed us that the woman had attempted this earlier and been kicked by the moose! This is enough to make one wonder if humans actually do sit atop the scale of animal intelligence.

Even those who should know better are sometimes a party to such dangerous foolishness. For instance, just last year the magazine of a national conservation organization featured a two-page color photo of a man in Quebec hugging a moose. Several letters to the editor pointed out that the photo would only encourage others to engage in such dangerous behavior and urged that some kind of retraction or warning be printed. There was no reply, which surely tells us something about their sense of editorial responsibility.

Moose are large, powerful, wild, and unpredictable, and hence potentially very dangerous. They should
never
be approached closely except by a trained and qualified person, such as a biologist or conservation officer. Unpredictability is the key word here. Yes, there are times when moose act exceedingly tame, and a person is able to walk up and touch one with impunity. On other occasions these seemingly tame moose can lash out unexpectedly, with decidedly detrimental results to the human involved. The problem is that there’s no way to tell in advance which way a moose will react.

Such apparent tameness may sometimes result from disease, but in other cases there’s no known reason. In any event, this sort of docility represents aberrant behavior in moose, which generally shy away from close human contact. It is true, however, that moose may become accustomed to humans in certain situations and ignore them unless they approach too closely. Ponds frequented in summer by both moose and people in boats are a good example. In that sort of setting, a moose may allow a boat and its occupants to come within a hundred feet or so without any evidence of concern. In nearby woods, however, the same moose will flee from humans at a far greater distance.

Even in situations where moose are acclimated to human proximity, too close an approach can be dangerous. The owner of a fishing camp in northern Maine, where boats routinely come reasonably near feeding moose without difficulty, told me about one unfortunate incident in which two or three fishermen in a boat decided to get considerably closer to a feeding moose than they should have, for the purpose of obtaining some good photos. Without warning, the moose charged them and overturned their boat. A great thrashing about of moose and men ensued in the shallow water. Luckily the men escaped serious harm, but they emerged from the water with a much healthier respect for moose!

There are also cases where moose are not at all tolerant of human presence. Sometimes the reason for aggressive moose behavior is unknown (unpredictability strikes again), but cows with calves can be very protective of their young, and hence highly dangerous; it’s especially perilous to come between a moose and her calf.

Bulls in rut, stoked by rampant testosterone levels, are also very dangerous—as I well know from personal experience. My most terrifying encounter with a wild animal involved a bull moose, and it happened in this fashion.

I was staying at the aforementioned fishing camp during late September, near the height of the moose’s mating season. One day it was raining and too windy to fish. Feeling overfed and underexercised, I set out for a brisk walk of several miles on the road, owned by a paper company, that provides access to the camps. About halfway back to camp there was a large clearcut on the right of the road and woods on the left. On the left, between the woods and the road, stood a dense growth of tall brush whose thick foliage totally obscured a view of anything within.

I was walking rapidly, when suddenly a soft but deep grunt sounded almost in my left ear. Instantly I realized what it was and thought,
Oh God, not that!
Before I could even react, a second grunt, almost piglike, followed, and then the bushes next to me began to move. I’ll readily confess that I panicked. I should have run down the road, cut into the woods on the left, and climbed a tree. Instead, I did what instinct told me to do and fled directly away from the sound, straight into the big clearcut on my right. Bad move!

After running about a hundred yards, I glanced back. To my horror, there was a large bull moose with wide antlers coming after me! In that instant, I was certain that I was a dead man and was terrified beyond words. There was nothing large enough to climb in the clearcut, but there were a few little clumps of brush here and there. I bobbed and weaved though three or four of these, all the while circling back toward the road. Finally I threw another look over my shoulder and, to my inexpressible joy and relief, there was no moose in sight.

I emerged onto the road farther away from camp and had to walk back past the spot where the big bull had been hidden. It was all I could do to muster enough courage to pass the spot, and I did so only with great trepidation, the utmost caution, and the firm conviction that if further flight became necessary, it would be into the woods and up the nearest climbable tree.

This adventure had what, in retrospect, was an amusing sequel, although it certainly didn’t seem it at the time. I was nearly back to camp and was just beginning to relax when, with a thunder of wings, two ruffed grouse exploded out of the roadside underbrush no more than three feet from me. I leaped two feet in the air and came down with my heart racing at a horrendous rate!

It wasn’t until weeks later, after the terror of this incident had diminished, that I realized what the bull moose was actually doing. A moose can easily outrun a human, and that bull could have caught me and stamped me into the ground in fifty yards if he had chosen to do so. He resented my presence in his territory during the rut and was chasing me, much as he might have a vanquished rival bull (I was certainly vanquished, but not a rival!) to ensure that I left the area. As soon as honor—and testosterone—were satisfied, he broke off the chase.

It has always struck me as ironic in the extreme that someone like me, who has constantly warned others about the dangers of approaching wild animals too closely—particularly large animals like the moose—should have been chased by one. The fact that I had no way of knowing about the bull’s presence also underscores the fact that nature is unpredictable and often dangerous; consequently, we should banish from our heads any warm, fuzzy thoughts about “benign nature.”

Moose are often called homely and ungainly, but that does a grave injustice to one of nature’s finest exhibits of adaptation, and they might better be termed imposing and majestic. As an example of adaptation, consider the food requirements of the moose. A large adult moose needs fifty to sixty pounds of vegetation daily in order to feed its huge frame. If a moose had to consume that quantity of browse by nibbling at the tips of twigs in the fashion of its whitetail relatives, it would have time for little else.

The animal’s name comes from the Algonquian
moosu,
which has been variously translated as “twig eater” and “he who strips off (leaves and bark).” My preference is for the latter because it’s such an apt description. The big, rubbery upper lip, which is partially responsible for the moose’s “homely” appearance, is in fact a most useful adaptation: the moose simply wraps its lip around a twig and, with a deft motion, strips away leaves, bark, and buds. This improved browsing method enables moose to eat their fill with exemplary speed and efficiency.

Likewise, the long legs that give the moose its “ungainly” appearance are admirably suited to life in the harsh climate that makes up the moose’s habitat. Those legs are not only long but also extremely powerful, and they easily drive their owner through deep snow that would mire a deer.

As huge as the moose seems to us, it’s merely the runner-up in the deer family’s size sweepstakes. An extinct relative from the last ice age, the somewhat misnamed Irish elk
(Megaloceros giganteus)
was the largest deer that ever lived. Its enormous antlers—up to twelve feet wide (some sources say up to fourteen feet)—were somewhat palmate (flattened, with fingerlike projections), although not as broadly so as those of a moose.

The species received its common name because the best-preserved specimens have been found in peat bogs and lake silt in Ireland. This giant deer became extinct after the end of the last ice age, and the latest known specimen of this truly remarkable beast dates back about eleven thousand years.

Extinct giants notwithstanding, our present-day moose is enormously impressive in its own right. How large is a moose? Of the seven subspecies of moose worldwide (the European subspecies is called elk), the largest is believed to be the Alaskan moose. There are various ways to measure the size of a moose. Weight is one of them, and a huge bull moose can weigh 1,600 pounds. Then there is height. A large moose can stand at least seven and a half feet tall at the shoulders, and the tips of the antlers on a big bull may tower a full ten feet above the ground. All of this is accompanied by strength commensurate with the immense height and bulk of its owner.

Antler development is equally impressive as a measure of size. Moose antlers can stretch as wide as six and a half feet and weigh well over fifty pounds while the moose is wearing them (shed antlers dry out and weigh substantially less). One of the mysteries of nature is how a moose can run full tilt through dense forest without constantly banging those great antlers against trees and other obstructions. Evidently a bull moose has an astonishing sense of spatial relations wired into its genetic makeup to give it such uncanny ability.

As with the antlers of their deer relatives, moose shed those great appendages every winter and grow another set, starting in the spring. Moose antlers, like those of deer, are quite tender during the growing period, covered with velvet and full of blood vessels and nerves.

A yearling bull will usually produce a set of spikes, just as many yearling whitetail bucks do. The following year, the two-year-old bull will grow small palms. Thereafter—health and other considerations being equal—his antler size will increase year by year until he reaches his prime. Then antler size levels off and remains more or less constant for a few more years. If the bull survives past his prime, antler size will begin to diminish as age takes its toll.

In general, ages five to ten years are considered the prime of life for a bull, though a few exceptional individuals may prolong that for another two or three years. These exceptions are likely the result of a combination of good nutrition, excellent health, lack of serious injuries, and genetics. Moose in general are substantially longer-lived than white-tailed deer. They often live well into their teens, and a few may even reach the age of twenty, so an occasional bull a dozen or so years old may still manage to be the biggest kid on the block, so to speak.

With the diminishing sunlight of late September, testosterone levels in the bulls rise accordingly, and their huge antlers come into their own. Now the mature bulls are just spoiling for a fight in order to show their dominance and claim a small harem of cows. Doubly unpredictable and dangerous during the rut, feisty bulls have been known to attack strange objects; there have even been reports of a bull moose charging a railroad locomotive!

One of the employees at the fishing camp where I was chased by the bull moose told me about a sight he had witnessed. A big bull that was causing a great commotion across the pond attracted his attention, so he hopped into a boat and went over to observe the show—from a discreet distance, I might add, for he wasn’t stupid. He reported that the moose, evidently frustrated by the absence of any rival bull with which to quarrel, took out his anger on the surrounding vegetation. It was an awesome display of power. The bull thrashed his antlers this way and that, on the ground and above it, stamping around and grunting all the while. Then he began to dig his antlers into the ground and uproot clumps of alders, tossing them into the air over his head. All in all, it was a bravura performance.