My Search For a Connecticut Moose (Pt. 2)

Opening up a game camera, turning it on, and hitting replay comes with quite a feeling of anticipation, especially when the goal it to capture a rare animal and you know one had walked through the area a time or two just before you places the camera. But that anticipation is frequently followed by minor disappointment- or at least it is for me, since I have no idea what I'm doing. My first camera pull revealed only the most elusive of animals... a half dozen shots of grey squirrels. Award winning, without a doubt. 

He's there, in the bottom left. Just peaking, seemingly aware of the camera. I won't lie it took a bit for me to figure out what had triggered the camera. And I should really re-set the date and time, jeez.... 

After a few visits to the site without anything of interest on camera and no fresh sign, I started to branch out. The initial forays were just to the surrounding areas. The two old beaver meadows I'd placed the trail cameras near weren't the only good looking habitat in the surrounding area. Just downstream was a much large, still active beaver meadow and pond. That was the first obvious place too look. Perhaps the moose hadn't strayed far but had just hopped down in elevation a tiny bit to an even more sheltered area. Emily and I did a full lap of that wetland one day, and though there was deer, coyote, and bobcat sign there were no moose tracks. On the next visit, my mother and I hiked not down watershed but up, to another small beaver meadow and a clear cut. Again, no moose sign.

Answers to how far an individual moose will range very. The state of New York indicates a broad range of five to fifty square miles. Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife says "With its great size and forage demands, the home range of the average moose in any given season is approximately three to six square miles, although they habitually wander much further." The website All About Moose sites data from Alberta suggesting that bulls have a range of 55 miles in the winter and 22 in the summer. Considering all of Connecticut is 5,543 square miles, that means I'm looking at a potential 1/100 chunk of the state for my bull (I'd found both cow and bull tracks). That's not huge but it isn't insignificant either. The question then became, should I break the habitat up into pieces I think look more suitable, or take a more random approach? One method that crossed my mind was walking and driving the easier routes and trying to find tracks where an individual had crossed the road. Though there isn't a rod grid per-se in Connecticut, there are enough roads to create a multitude of closed loops. So by driving or hiking those loops, I could at least determine if a moose had crossed into or out of them, possibly pinning one down to a confined area that it hadn't yet left. This wasn't a highly appealing strategy to me, but perhaps something I could use down the road if I found tracks that were a few days old. 

The activity lull convinced me to give the area a little rest. I pulled my cameras and it was a couple weeks before I returned. Sometimes absence is important. I try to be discrete and unimpactful, but there's no such thing as being entirely so. I know I leave smells and signs when I'm out there, and animals recognize these. So I let the woods rest, let the moose do their thing if they were still anywhere nearby. 

When I returned, it was past the first day of meteorological spring, and the weather had definitely made a turn. There was still snow on the ground, a touch more than last I'd been in fact, but it was all hard and crusted over now. It was also covered with all sorts of branches and hemlock needles from a number of very windy days. Emily and I made our way to the area where sign had been turning up most consistently before, sometimes able to stay on top of the hard snow, sometimes post-holing more than we'd like. It was a loud form of travel, and I had no illusions of sneaking up on a moose this time. I just hoped we might find tracks again. Deer sign was plenty at first, but no moose. Whitetail deer are such a ubiquitous part of the northeast woodlands today. In fact, far more so than was historically the case. When the northeast was colonized, there where whitetail deer here, but apparently fewer than today. Colonists fairly rapidly hunted these deer to near or full extirpation in many places. ¹In Burrilville: As It Was, and As It Is, published in 1856, Horace A. Keach writes "To a citizen of this town, it will not seem improbable when we suggest that the last deer of Rhode Island was shot on the margin of Wallum Lake." It was likely that the reforestation of the New England and some reintroduction efforts that allowed whitetail deer to return, and likely to levels well beyond their former numbers. Deer don't do poorly in a lightly developed landscape. They tolerate suburbia, and they especially like farms. In the midwest, where corn crop makes up tens of thousands of square miles, deer flourish. In 2020 in Pennsylvania, hunters harvested 435,180 deer according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission. In tiny and developed Connecticut, there are still well over 100,000 deer. See, deer also love not being predated, and despite the complaints hunters make about coyotes and bear, we got rid of the two effective deer predators keeping New England's population in check: wolves and mountain lions. Coyote are not great deer predators, though they can take some in deep snow when the deer are post-holing and they are able to run along on top. But neither they, nor we, do that good a job of managing deer herds, to the degree that whitetail deer can be ecologically detrimental given their wide and often dense distribution. They have outsized impacts on the plants they favor to feed on, and when too numerous can clean out undergrowth in what would otherwise be more diverse and healthy forest. 

There were deer tracks everywhere in this wood, including some big ones. But eventually, finally, there it was again: that unmistakably bigger trackway of a moose. 

I decided we should follow these tracks, even though they weren't that fresh. We stood to learn a lot if we could follow this animal's movements. Like a man on a mission, step after step I followed that moose. At one point I almost lost the trackway when it went into a patch of ground the snow had thawed from. There was what I though to be a different set of prints along it, and after a bit I determined that the moose had simply bedded down in that clear patch and left it right about where it entered. The animal made a few decisions that to my mind made little sense, including back tracking on two occasions, once right on top of it's own tracks, another just a few yards off. It moved eastward but zigzagged. Mostly it traveled at the same steady pace, but at times it slowed and its path meandered more. It may have covered the ground I followed it over in much less time than it took Emily and I to- about three miles, I'd estimate. Eventually, the trackway led us to one of the biggest wetlands in the area, and that area was covered in moose tracks. I'd say we saw trackways from at least five different individuals. This was mighty encouraging. I picked a spot to put up a camera again where two individuals passed through in a logical choke point, or funnel-like form to the landscape that I hoped would force a moose in front of my camera. Following the trackways had shaken my confidence a little, though. I was less than sure another moose would pass through this spot within a few weeks. They were a little more careless and erratic in their travelling than I'd expected them to be. Of course, I don't know what made the individual we followed back track, or why it followed certain topographic contours, or why it seemed to slow when it did. If I did know that, this would all make perfectly good sense to me I'm sure. But I'm no moose. My foolish human brain wasn't evolved nor trained by life around making the same decisions that a moose has to, so I was anthropomorphizing some I'm sure. We can't help that, we think "what would I do if I was a moose", when what we should be thinking is simply "what does a moose do". In complete ignorance of what a moose does at any given time, I have to think it's path was meandering and illogical. In reality, that moose's path made complete sense... to the moose. It is under no obligation to make sense to me. 

After placing the camera, we made our own tracks out. It's very probable that a moose would look at these and think they made no sense at all. I've been followed by animals before, usually coyotes. In my mid teens I spent a lot of time wandering the woods in deep snow, and on many occasions I'd find coyote prints following my own as I back tracked not infrequently. This never worried me at all, though there are rare instances of coyotes killing. Most coyote-human interactions are extremely benign. Often, claims of coyote "attacks" wouldn't be best characterized as such, and instances of coyotes biting people as the aggressor aren't very common, though they're becoming more frequent with time.² I've never once felt threatened by coyotes. But they do follow my tracks sometimes. Why? They probably aren't hunting me, I know that. A lot of the time, I got the impression they were using my path as easier passage. The snow was light and powdery many of these occasions, such that travel would be slow going even for a light canid. My path, plowed deep as I dragged through the snow pushing stubbornly onward, must look quite inviting to any traveling animal. Perhaps it was curiosity though; I wasn't likely to spot tracks over top of mine in these woods were there not snow. Maybe I'm being followed more often than I think.

¹ I found this source through Christian McBurney's article "When Deer Became Extinct in Rhode Island" on smallstatebighistory.com, a great site with a lot of Rhode Island historical articles. The book itself is the second very old piece of locally specific literature I've now read a chunk of for the sake of one of these sorts of blog posts. It can be purchased or is available archived online and is interesting in its own right. 

² Coyote Attacks on Humans in the United States and Canada, L. A. White and S. D. Gehrt, 2009.

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