IN THE LATE 1800S, a group of New Hampshire sportsmen attempted to count every last moose in the state. They found 13. Today the herd numbers about 6,500, and the great gangly creatures have been sighted in virtually every town. In 1998 the moose was chosen to grace the state's conservation license plate—an environmental happy ending, courtesy of the 1901 ban on moose hunting.
Actually, it's not quite that simple. The moose resurgence represents not only the success of an early environmental regulation, but also the unanticipated benefit of an apparent natural disaster. In the 1970s and 1980s, spruce budworm wiped out millions of trees in northern New England, and the forest products industry used extensive clearcutting to salvage as much timber as possible. The regeneration of the forest with dense new growth created "moose nirvana," says Pete Pekins '81G, professor of wildlife management. And the story is hardly over.
As their numbers have exploded across northern New England, moose have been turning up in some unlikely places, including a suburban Boston gas station and a Durham swimming pool. There was the father who tried to pose his 3-year-old for a photo in front of a browsing moose on a northern New Hampshire roadside. (Message to parents from state moose biologist Kristine Bontaites: "Don't!") And every evening throughout the summer, moose-tour operators drive vanloads of tourists to salt licks—low-lying areas where road salt collects—and turn large spotlights on the mud-slurping moose.
Indeed, there is something surreal about the life of the modern-day moose. In Minnesota and Norway, for example, a moose wearing a radio-transmitter collar may find itself squaring off against a wolf who is also wearing radio-transmitter collar.
Now that we're rich in moose, New Hampshire biologists, conservation officers, hunters and wildlife lovers hope the animals will remain a vibrant part of the environment, economy and culture. Pekins and his students have been doing their part by studying moose behavior and population dynamics. Emphasis on the word dynamics. "Nothing stays the same," says Pekins. "It's the lesson of forest wildlife management."
THE MOOSE MYSTIQUE
Chris Habeck '05 has seen bull moose and mother moose, swimming moose and suckling moose, Norwegian moose and New Hampshire moose. He has watched a moose use its long tongue to grab leafy branches and then, with forceful upward jerks of its head, strip them bare. Even when a moose slips away without so much as a twig snap right before Habeck arrives, he can still get a glimpse into the animal's private world, hear the buzzing retinue of flies she left behind, feel the warmth in the impression where she had bedded down in the heat of the day. "I feel like a crime-scene investigator," he says.
In his four years as a wildlife management major, Habeck has performed three moose-related research projects on two continents with the aid of grants from the university's undergraduate and international research programs. He has "walked in on" a moose in the wild hundreds of times, and yet his heart still pounds whenever he knows he is about to encounter one. He hunts his quarry with a radio receiver that bleeps at regular intervals like a hospital heart monitor and then, as he approaches the hidden thousand-pound creature, starts clicking like a Geiger counter. "It's just unbelievable to be able to get out of a truck and walk right up to a moose," he says.
Habeck is not alone in his fascination with the species known to the Algonquins as "twig eater," to scientists as Alces alces (Latin for elk) and to the Europeans as elg. With a hump on its shoulders, a huge droopy nose, four-inch-long nostrils and virtually no tail, the moose looks like an early prototype of a camel. Add a 60-pound, 30-point set of antlers, however, and "goofy" suddenly becomes "magnificent."
Every year, a bull moose grows new antlers, and until he reaches his prime, each set is larger and more complex than the last. Composed of the fastest-growing bone known to animal (nearly an inch a day), antlers are nourished by a thin skin covered with fine hairs called "velvet." Just before the fall rutting season, the bull removes the velvet by rubbing his antlers against tree trunks. Then he's ready to compete for females by engaging in dramatic shoving matches with other bulls. In many cases, the mere sight of a large rack of antlers will cause a younger animal to concede the point without a fight.
Other moose aren't the only ones who are impressed by a large rack. Cast-off antlers, called "sheds," are made into chandeliers and table legs—or sold for up to $200 a pair. For hunters, a large set of antlers, measured and ranked at a Fish and Game moose check station, becomes a trophy complete with bragging rights.
Antlered or not, a single moose can provide 500 pounds of meat for a hunter's family, a wilderness experience for a hiker, or a just a Bullwinkle moment for someone driving through northern New England. Last year more than 15,500 people from across the country entered the state's annual drawing for roughly 500 moose-hunting permits. In 2001—the last time anyone counted—some 870,000 tourists made wildlife viewing trips in the state, whether on foot or on wheels, spending more than $300 million in the process. "If you interview tourists up north, their number one priority is to see moose," says Pekins. "And once you see one, most people want to see another one."
The proliferating moose are also a source of some consternation. A typical tourist, says Pekins, not only craves a glimpse of a moose but fears a collision with one on the road and perhaps frets about why the state allows these wonderful creatures to be shot by hunters. A commercial landowner may worry that too many munching moose will damage the regenerating forest. A hunter may resent losing out in the moose-hunt lottery year after year, even though he's dodging the critters on local roads and chasing them away from his backyard clothesline. It is the task of wildlife management to juggle all these competing interests and concerns. Sociology, economics and politics are all part of the act, but biology comes first. To that end, New Hampshire Fish and Game's Bontaites commissioned Pekins to lead a five-year study of moose movements, mortality and habitat use.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
It's rutting season in northern New Hampshire, and Tony Musante '05G is on the edge of an overgrown clearcut, doing his best imitation of a dominant bull moose—grunting and huffing, slashing and thrashing in the dense growth of hardwood saplings. He scrapes a stick against a tree trunk to suggest the sound of a moose raking his antlers back and forth. Under the pink sunrise-tinted sky, Musante waits for about 20 minutes in a small clearing between a gravel logging road and the clearcut. No response. The receiver in his hand tells him he's near a bull with a radio-transmitter collar, but the moose isn't coming any closer.
Taking a different tack, Musante holds his hands to his mouth and lets out a long tremulous moan—the love call of a female moose. Soon the sound of snapping saplings heralds the arrival of a moose—with no collar. Finding a graduate student instead of a cow moose, the disappointed bull walks back into the woods, and the disappointed graduate student returns to tracking his skittish collared bull.
As the lead technicians on the UNH moose study in northern New Hampshire, Musante and Dave Scarpitti '05G have supervised the work of 20 undergraduate field technicians and presented a paper at an international conference. Since the spring of 2002, they have spent many summer days and school-year weekends keeping tabs on some 93 moose over an area covering nearly 400 square miles, using skimobiles, a pickup truck and a small airplane.
To monitor birth and mortality rates of young calves during calving season, the researchers pay a visit to each collared cow twice a week. They use radio telemetry and mathematical triangulation to get a rough location and then walk in on her to check on the calf. Sometimes it can take an hour to make it through the final 300 yards, be it swamp or briar patch, to get to a cow. That's when low-tech skills come in handy, and Musante may strip some leaves from branches in order to sound like another herbivore and avoid alarming his research prey.
These walk-ins can be more hair-raising than an encounter with a bull, even in rutting season. A protective mother moose may signal her intent to charge—and stomp, if need be—an intruder by pinning back her ears and raising the hair on her neck. "Almost every one of our students has been run up a tree at some point," says Pekins. "One of my undergraduate techs found I could run faster than he could when we got chased by a cow protecting her calves. He was laughing pretty hard."
A perfect walk-in, however, is "to sneak in quietly, no matter how long it takes, get your data and view a wild moose that doesn't even know you are there," says Musante. In his experience, a protective female will only pursue a fleeing human for about 50 yards and then turn back to her calf. As she retreats, though, she may express her displeasure with an awe-inspiring roar, which he describes as a "medieval sound, like someone beating a backhoe bucket with a sledge hammer." He wishes that the people who chase moose, or throw firecrackers at them, could hear that sound.
"For all the interference and stupid behavior of people at salt licks, it's amazing that there aren't more injuries," says Pekins, noting that it's possible to see 10 moose at once in these roadside spots. "Nonconsumptive" use of wildlife (i.e., viewing as opposed to hunting) is an increasingly important concern for wildlife managers, who want to make sure that wild animals don't hurt humans, and conversely, that humans don't "love them to death."
In an earlier project, Pekins and Fish and Game's Judith Silverberg '00G studied the effects of wildlife viewing on moose behavior at salt licks. Anecdotal evidence had suggested that, over a summer, moose may be cagey enough to shift their salt-seeking forays to hours when "nonconsumptive wildlife users" are likely to be sleeping. But as far as the researchers could tell by looking at the pattern of human and moose visits, as long as the humans were well-behaved the animals remained unfazed by the attention.
MOOSE MOTHERING
Asked to define the essence of moose, Habeck chooses one word: indifferent. When you're as big as a moose—and the wolf has disappeared and hunting has long been banned or restricted—you're not afraid of much, except, perhaps, threats to your newborn calf. (In the study so far, roughly a quarter of the calves have failed to survive their first summer.) The one bond a moose forms is with her calf, says Scarpitti, recalling a "good mom" who hung around for several days after her calf was run over by a truck.
With a grant from the UNH Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, Habeck spent a summer studying the habitat used by mother moose during the first couple of weeks after giving birth. He found that the mother and calf often spend that time in a mossy bower ringed by evergreen trees. The moss, he believes, may diffuse the birthing odors that can attract predators like bear and coyotes, while the evergreen trees may hide the calf from view.
By the age of two weeks, says Musante, the once-wobbly calf is "flying around. Then the mother starts dragging the calf all over the place." Apparently the salt lick is a most memorable destination. An adult moose, the researchers have found, will continue to visit the one he frequented during his first summer—even when it's a 10-mile overnight jaunt from his new territory of roughly six or seven square miles. (Two of the moose in the study have gone on extraordinary hundred-mile walks.)
When a moose drives her yearling offspring away in early May, it's a sure sign that she is about to give birth. These rejected teenage moose, left to fend for themselves, are much more likely to get into accidents with motor vehicles during that period.
IN THE BALANCE
For the most part, hunters, land owners and tourists in northern New Hampshire seem to be peacefully coexisting with each other as well as the moose. Fish and Game models have predicted, and the UNH study seems to be confirming, that the moose population has stabilized. In order to keep it that way, wildlife managers need to understand the causes of mortality.
The number of moose killed by hunters each year—slightly under 400—is a known quantity, thanks to the carefully regulated hunt. Hunters patiently wait for years for their number to come up in the moose-hunt lottery, and there is little evidence of poaching. Another 250 moose are killed each year in automobile crashes. (Five people died in these accidents between 1998 and 2003. With their long legs and dark coloring, moose are difficult to see, especially at night. While motorists are 100 times more likely to die in a crash with another car, Bontaites points out, it is prudent to avoid overdriving one's headlights, and to brake for moose even when they are just standing by the side of the road.)
Other possible causes of mortality are attacks on young calves by black bears or coyotes, as well as destruction of habitat. The latter has not been a problem for the study population of nearly 100 New Hampshire moose, however. Looking at preliminary data, Pekins notes that the most surprising result has been the high number of deaths (more than half of the total) attributed to winter kill—when an animal dies just prior to spring "green up."
"We've found a pretty high number of the previous year's calves dying in April," he says. "Right now our best guess is that they're dying from malnutrition associated with heavy tick loads." According to the National Moose Foundation, the highest number of ticks ever calculated on one animal exceeded 400,000, found on a moose in Manitoba. Unlike the deer tick, which is actually harmless to deer, the winter moose tick has only one host, and remains attached from fall until spring, sucking as much as half the animal's total volume of blood. New Hampshire moose can also play host to various infestations of lungworm, brainworm and tapeworm. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, Bontaites notes, "you don't want to come back as a moose."
When and if the study confirms the association between tick load and calf mortality, Fish and Game may start trying to predict tick infestations based on weather information. "If we have a warm dry fall followed by a short winter," says Bontaites, "we may want to cut back on the number of hunting permits."
On the other hand, too many moose—each consuming up to 60 pounds of tree branches a day—could harm the environment by overbrowsing. In fact it was the sight of the deer-damaged forest in national parks where hunting is prohibited that inspired Chris Habeck to leave his job as a sound engineer and go back to school in wildlife management. When deer or moose multiply unchecked, they can decimate young plants in the understory, giving the forest an eerie, parklike appearance and interfering with the natural regeneration of trees.
That's when the "mighty tick" could actually come to the rescue, notes Pekins. "The tick may effectively limit population growth by reducing calf survival and, in turn, protect the forest from an overpopulation of moose."
As the moose study winds down this year, Pekins is launching projects on wild turkeys and black bears, two other species that have rebounded across New England. Meanwhile Habeck is off to Wisconsin, where he will use aphid research to study habitat degradation while earning a doctorate. He already has the researcher's ability to hypothesize about complex environmental systems. "As the climate gets warmer," he predicts, "tree species will migrate northward. The foraging patterns of moose will help determine which trees shift their home range over time."
In other words, even as we carefully plot ways to manage the moose's world, the moose may be subtly shaping ours.