Features

The moose's droopy nose warms sub-zero air and seals out water when foraging for aquatic plants.

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

In 2000, then-Governor Jeanne Shaheen unveiled New Hampshire's conservation license plate, featuring the moose. The backyard kiddie pool lacks water lilies and other sodium-rich plants craved by moose, but it does offer respite from summer heat. Moose may not flee from people or cars, but that doesn't mean they're friendly. Their unpredictable behavior can lead to car accidents, and in rare instances, death or injury by trampling.

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.

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