Biologists in New England are experimenting with a new method to protect the moose wandering the backwoods. They have arranged for hunters to kill more of them.
In Maine, which has by far the most moose in the area, wildlife officials have granted an extra 550 permits this autumn allowing hunters to shoot a cow or a calf in a 1,000 square mile patch of woodland near the Canadian border. Vermont, which has a far smaller herd, has given out 40 extra hunting permits.
The decision follows growing concern over deaths caused by winter ticks, which latch on to moose and suck their blood.
Nick Fortin, deer and moose project leader at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, said other animals were better at knocking off the insects. “Deer, for example, lick themselves regularly. They are a little more flexible. They can scratch behind their ears like a dog does,” he said. Moose on the other hand, are far less bendy. They would be hopeless at yoga. “They evolved in the north where they didn’t have parasites to deal with,” Fortin said. “They don’t groom. It’s really a problem.”
Within a few months a moose can become host to a dining populace of 50,000 ticks. Calves struggling to survive their first winter are particularly vulnerable. A 2018 study suggested that ticks were killing 70 per cent of them across a stretch of Maine and northern New Hampshire. Ticks were also seen to be reducing the ability of cows to reproduce.
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Biologists believe that reducing the number of moose could curb the tick population. “We hope that if we reduce winter tick numbers, we are going to be able to reduce the number of moose mortalities,” Lee Kantar, Maine’s moose biologist, told hunters in the five-year experiment. The hunters have been asked to remove the ovaries of any cow they kill and present them at check-in stations, along with the teeth. The teeth indicate the age of the moose and the ovaries can show whether a cow was healthy enough for a pregnancy.
The experiment has attracted criticism from animal rights activists and suggestions from locals about whether the moose might be shot with tick-killing pesticide instead. “We have done research in a limited way with various fungal pathogens to kill ticks,” Fortin said, adding that the idea was impractical. “We are talking about thousands and thousands of acres of dense, wild forest.”
Wildlife officials had tried catching and treating moose individually for their ticks. “We only got two,” Kantar told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re never doing that again.”
Elk and safety
• In an average year six people are killed in the US and 640 injured in road collisions involving moose.
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• The largest moose ever shot was a bull which was killed at the Yukon River in September 1897. It weighed 820kg and was 2.33 metres tall.
• A typical moose, weighing 360kg, can eat up to 32kg of shrubs and other plants a day.
• Moose are excellent swimmers and have been known to dive 5.5 metres deep.