Moose in the Morning by May Sarton

Oh wild and gentle beast, Immense antlered shape, This morning in the meadow! Like something ancient, lost And found now, promise kept, Emerging from the shadow, Emerging while I slept— Wilderness and escape! You set me free to shirk The day's demanding work And cast my guilt away. You make a truant of me This moose-enchanted day When all I can is see, When all I am is this Astonishment and bliss. "Moose in the Morning" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems. © Norton, 1993. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

A Use For A Moose By Shel Silverstein

The antlers of a standing moose, As everybody knows, Are just the perfect place to hang Your wet and drippy clothes. It’s quick and cheap, but I must say I’ve lost a lot of clothes that way.

Bull Moose by Aiden Nowlan

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps,
came the bull moose
to be stopped at last by a pole-fenced pasture.

Too tired to turn or, perhaps, aware
there was no place left to go, he stood with the cattle.
They, scenting the musk of death, seeing his great head
like the ritual mask of a blood god, moved to the other end
of the field, and waited.

The neighbours heard of it, and by afternoon
cars lined the road. The children teased him
with alder switches and he gazed at them
like an old, tolerant collie. The woman asked
if he could have escaped from a Fair.

The oldest man in the parish remembered seeing
a gelded moose yoked with an ox for plowing.
The young men snickered and tried to pour beer
down his throat, while their girl friends took their pictures.

And the bull moose let them stroke his tick-ravaged flanks,
let them pry open his jaws with bottles, let a giggling girl
plant a little purple cap
of thistles on his head.

When the wardens came, everyone agreed it was a shame
to shoot anything so shaggy and cuddlesome.
He looked like the kind of pet
women put to bed with their sons.

So they held their fire. But just as the sun dropped in the river
the bull moose gathered his strength
like a scaffolded king, straightened and lifted his horns
so that even the wardens backed away as they raised their rifles.

When he roared, people ran to their cars. All the young men
leaned on their automobile horns as he toppled.

Moose Dreams

There are times when all the chutzpa I
can muster isn't enough, fug and bluster
all I can do, and damned if it doesn't
just stand there, legs straddling
a berm of washboard dust-ruts
and in late noon sun stare me
blue in the face: lord, we could almost
trade places, my back strained
by the weight of those great bone wings,
my tongue itching for lily root.
And musk, lord, the pheromones,
a day so sweet with elderberry's too rank
fume I could die twice over snuffing.
While the truck mumbles and a trout spanks
the cooler, I almost outdo myself.
But reason, that too-convenient shortcut,
creeps back, if only so far: the rest as we say
is silence, dust and the sputter of flies
and when lumbering to go it pauses
and throws me its last worst look
its sorrow is Christ's, dewlap
jeweled, a beatitude of moss.

by William Johnson

DANGER Moose

Moose on the loose
BY KAI EISELEIN
LatahEagle Editor

A young wayward moose kept Moscow students in class a little longer Thursday, February 29 until Moscow police and a Fish and Game officer herded the animal away from Moscow Junior High.

The moose was first spotted on north Garfield Street shortly after 2 p.m. and police found the animal a short time later wandering along east E Street. Using a cruiser, an officer tried to herd the animal away from the parking lot between the junior high and the district offices, but the moose turned and trotted westward along the fence, toward the center of town. It tried to turn and go through the gate into the east parking lot of the school, but another police car sped to the gate and blocked its path. The moose eventually wandered into the backyard of a residence, where it kept a wary eye on a gathering crowd of neighbors snapping photos and officers blocking the street.

In a Mexican standoff with the moose and unsure about how safely get it out of town police called for an Idaho Fish and Game officer to come the scene, as luck would have it an officer was near the city and arrived within a few minutes.
After some discussion, the IDFG officer and police decided to try to herd the moose west, across Mountain View Road and out of town.

With a plan in place, the IDFG officer went behind the house and chased the moose out of the yard. At first it went north, across E Street, then decided to trot west along E instead with a police cruiser, the IDFG officer and a Moscow animal control officer in hot pursuit.

They eventually got the animal turned around and headed in the right direction; it rambled through a few backyards and ran across east F Street, nearly bowling over a newspaper photographer before heading towards Mountain View Road, which had been closed off. With a few twists and turns, officers eventually got the animal across the road and out of town near Mountain View Park about an hour after the moose was first spotted.

Worried about children being let out of school with the animal so close, MPD asked the district to keep the junior high students inside until the animal was safely away. Since the school busses all run on the same schedule, the district kept students throughout the district for an extra 15 minutes.

While moose may look relatively harmless, they, like other animals may attack when cornered. When they do, they use their hooves and size to stomp their target. A single blow from a kick can be fatal. Although rare, people have been killed as a result of a moose attack.

moose vs grizzles: the eternal struggle

A Conversation With Joel Berger
When Grizzlies Ruin Eden, Moose Take to the Road
M. Scott Moon/The Pennsylvania Clarion, via Associated Press

ROAD HAVEN Studying prey-predator relationships, Joel Berger has noticed that each year, moose in Grand Teton National Park move closer to the road to calve.

Joel Berger, 56, is a specialist in ungulates, hoofed mammals that, in general, walk on the tips of their toes to sustain their body weight. His investigations into the behavior and habits of rhinoceros, bison, pronghorn sheep and moose have been used to find ways to preserve them and their environments.
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Tom Bauer for The New York Times

'We think that the Grand Teton moose have figured out a way to use humans as shields for their babies.' - Joel Berger.

On a recent visit to New York City, Dr. Berger, a professor at the University of Montana and senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, drew a photograph from his wallet of a saiga, a smiling Mongolian antelope that looks as if it is equal parts camel and deer.

“This is my latest campaign,” he said. “Most of them were wiped out by hunters when the cold war ended. Now, the Mongolian government is trying to help them make a comeback, and we’re helping figure out their migratory routes. Isn’t she worth saving?”

An edited version of a two-hour interview and a subsequent telephone conversation follows:

Q. O.K., why did the moose go down to the road?

A. If she’s a native of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and she’s pregnant, she may have done it because she wanted to give birth in a place where one of her main predators, the grizzly bear, rarely goes.

Grizzlies tend to avoid humans. In the part of Yellowstone that I’ve been studying this past decade, the Grand Teton National Park, grizzlies don’t go near the roads because they know that’s where the humans and cars are.

I collar and track moose as part of my wider research on prey-predator relationships. For the past 10 years, we’ve noticed that Grand Teton moose are, each year, moving about 375 feet closer to the roads when they are about to calve. We think they are doing it because they’ve figured out that the paved road is a bear-free zone where their newborns stand a better chance of survival. Up in Alaska, grizzly bears have been observed killing between 50 and 90 percent of the newborn moose population. We think that the Grand Teton moose have figured out a way to use humans as shields for their babies.

Q. Is this a new behavior for them?

A. It’s recent. Until the mid-1990s, the moose of the Yellowstone basin lived in a kind of moose paradise, without predators. The wolves had all been shot out about 70 years earlier. Grizzly bears were heavily hunted, and there were few of them. Without their traditional predators, Grand Teton moose were docile, naïve.

That all changed in the mid-1990s when the grizzlies rebounded because of a ban on their hunt and when wolves were reintroduced to the Yellowstone region. The first Grand Teton moose to encounter a wolf probably thought it was nothing more than a big coyote, which she didn’t fear. We reconstructed the interaction from tracks we found in the snow. From what we could see, the wolves just walked up to the moose and grabbed her 300 pound calf and ate it.

Grand Teton moose have learned a lot since then. Most of us think of moose as these dim lumbering Bullwinkles, but they figure things out. Today, if I were to play wolf calls over a loudspeaker to a herd in the park, they’d become vigilant — and they’d move away.

Q. Isn’t this just moose instinct at work?

A. No. They didn’t do it 15 years ago.

Q. Why did you once dress up as a moose?

A. Legitimate scientific inquiry. We wanted to see how the Grand Teton moose reacted to the smell of bear scat. In Alaska, where the moose are very bear-savvy, if they smell it, they’ll manifest fear. But what about “naïve” moose? Well, you can’t just go up to moose and put odiferous bear poop patties before them. The outfit — and a tactic of acting like a moose — was a way of getting in close. We only did this perhaps four times, but I’ll never live it down. The media made a big deal of it. Letterman wanted me on his show. We didn’t go.

Q. How did your guys react to the bear patties?

A. At that time, bears hadn’t been that much of a danger to them. And so they mostly ignored it. But within one moose generation, really only a few years, they started to wise up.

Canada

....
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are Jean de Brebeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that.
You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,
and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

Billy Collins