The Elusive Moose

Like any good trip leaders getting to know their clients, Peg and Ellie asked us during our first dinner together what -- aside from wolves -- we were hoping to see while in Yellowstone. I had learned from past experience that hanging the success of a trip on one species, especially an elusive, predatory, keystone species like the wolf, risked disappointment. So Trish and I had done enough research to know that even if wolves didn’t show up, we would see plenty of other wildlife: sightings of bison, coyotes, and elk  were high on our wish list.

And I really, really, really wanted to see a moose.

Despite numerous weeks of summer childhood vacations in prime moose country in Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and more recent trips to Alaska and British Columbia, I had never seen one, although not for lack of trying.

I got hooked on the notion of meeting a moose when I was about ten. Our friend and neighbor Marty Smith had spent quite a bit of time backpacking in the Maine woods, and he told a wonderful tale of awakening early one mornings to the wet snorting sounds of some wild animal snuffling the sleeping bag he had pulled up over his head (he hadn’t bothered with a tent).

Terrified that it was a bear, although they were rare in that area in those days, he had remained motionless, playing dead. The snuffler retreated a short distance, then began chewing something. Overcome with curiosity, Marty had eased open his sleeping bag, slipped on his glasses, and found himself almost nose-to-nose with a browsing moose. 

Since being trampled by a startled moose (females can grow to 800 pounds, and males weigh in around 1100 pounds) would be every bit as painful and potentially lethal as tangling with a black bear, Marty went back to playing dead until the moose moved on.

After hearing Marty’s tale, I spent every hour our family drove through woodsy and marshy areas of Maine during our vacations with my window plastered to the nose, scanning for the big brown frame of the largest member of the deer family, but to no avail. 

So one of the hopes I brought with me to Yellowstone was that of seeing a moose. Peg and Ellie thought they could deliver; they had seen one almost every morning on their way into the park with the group they had led the week before.

And so every morning, on the drive down from Cooke City into the Lamar Valley, whichever naturalist was at the wheel of my van would drive slowly, everyone scanning the woods that grew right to the road’s edge for the silhouette of the elusive creature.

Unlike the elk and bison we saw in abundance, moose are largely solitary. You’ll find mothers with calves, but adults are not likely to hang out together except during mating times. 

Although their long legs let them navigate the deep snow, they lack the bison’s strong neck muscles for plowing snow out of the way as they search for food. Instead, when the snow starts to pile up, they abandon the willow thickets lining the streams and rivers of the park in favor of the surrounding fir-blanketed mountains. There the canopy of the subalpine fir and Douglas fir trees shades the snow and keeps it from forming the icy crust that would impede a moose’s movements. 

The moose’s solitary nature and penchant for wintering in the deep shadows of a fir forest makes them darned hard to spot, and day after day passed with no sign of a moose.  On the last morning we would spend in Yellowstone, Ellie drove our van at a crawl, determined to find me a moose. 

As we neared the elevation line below which their subalpine pine habitat does not grow, I was steeling myself to once more leaving prime moose territory without having actually seen one of the magnificent creatures, when movement in a relatively open meadow across the road caught our attention. Ellie pulled over with a whoop of triumph, and we all pointed our cameras and clicked away at my elusive moose.

It was a good-sized female wading belly-deep in snow perhaps 30 feet from the edge of the road. Small fir saplings and other edible plants poked out of the deep white blanket all around her.

She leaned forward, reached out with prehensile-looking lips, and chomped onto a branch. With one smooth movement she dragged her  rubbery lips along the length of the branch, denuding it of needles. She calmly chewed and swallowed, looked over at our van, and moved onto the next branch. With the efficiency of a silent woodchipper, she stripped every branch within reach of her long neck, and then moved on to another spot where the tops of several other saplings thrust through the snow.

She moved with the loose-jointed gait of a marionette, picking up each long leg and swinging it through the snow, leaving a track of deep holes connected by shallow grooves behind her. I was fascinated by the articulation of her rear knees, which bent backwards, like a flamingo’s.

We cautiously opened the van’s doors and quietly approached the berm of snow the plows had built up over the winter, crouching down to use it and the scattered bushes for cover as we approached her for closer views. In the snowy silence we stood listening to her snuffling breath and the ripping noise of needles being scraped off of branches until we grew so cold our nostrils pinched with frost. 

It wasn’t even 9 a.m. as we climbed back into the van and dropped down towards the Lamar Valley, but the day had been a wildlife-watching success for me already: I had finally bagged my moose!