Moose coming out of the woods

by Kevin Strauss

Now that the snow is gone and green grass and herbs are sprouting on the sunning roadsides, moose are moving out of the deep woods and onto roadsides and fields. The moose we see now look different from the well-fed, antlered creatures of fall. Spring moose look more gaunt and males dropped their antlers in December. They are also calmer than the bull moose were during the fall rut, when these love-crazed and aggressive near-sighted animals faced off against hikers, cars, trucks and sometimes trains.

Moose are solitary animals. You will only see more than one at a time when you see a mother with a calf or yearling or if you are in a feeding area that is so good that it attracts several moose to feed there at the same time. While most people don’t need a description for moose (Alces alces), you may not know that these animals can average up to 1,000 lbs. for females and $1,200 pounds for males. They are up to seven feet tall at the shoulder. The largest moose recorded in North America was shot in Alaska and weighed 1,800 pounds.

Moose are so big that they don’t have many predators. A large pack of wolves may prey an old or injured adult moose. Black bears will prey on calves. But moose aren’t helpless, they can run up to 35 m.p.h. and can fight off predators by kicking with their strong legs. Being diurnal (day-active) animals, moose spend much of the day either feeding on plants or resting in a secluded place and chewing their cud. Like cows, moose are ruminants, meaning that they have a four-chambered stomach. When they eat twigs and bark from fir, maple and aspen trees (in winter) or water lilies, maple leaves, grass or sedges (in summer), the food goes into one chamber. Then in late-morning, a moose will rest and regurgitate the the plant material to chew on it once again. Then in mid-afternoon the moose gets up and feeds some more. Moose eat about 60 pounds of plant material each day and 40 pounds per day in the winter.

While many visitors (and residents) of the area want to know how to see moose, they aren’t easy animals to find on cue. We only have about 4,000 moose in Minnesota, compared with a deer population of over a million. They have a home range of about 4-6 square miles (for females) so they aren’t very common anyway. What’s more, in the summer, moose retreat to ponds, swamps and marshes to feed on the aquatic plants and submerge into the water to avoid blackflies and mosquitoes. So unless you want to spend a lot of time mucking through wetlands, you aren’t likely to see many moose. Overall the best way to find a moose is to look for them on the roadsides feeding in ditches or marshes at dusk and dawn. One top moose-viewing area is down Highway 1 just south of Isabella. The ditches and roadside swamps in that area often have moose at dawn and dusk. By mid-day the moose are usually off in the woods chewing their cud.