Moose Prove a Menace and a Mania in Maine

Steering his white cruiser along the two-lane blacktop, Sgt. Bill Crawford of the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department kept a watchful eye on the road and on the woods that edge it. “It’s second nature--you look for cars first and then for moose,” he said. “Except at night, when you look for moose first, because the cars are easier to see.”

The official name of this stretch of highway in remote northern Maine is Route 201. Its unofficial name is Moose Alley. Moose-vehicle collisions are increasing in Maine, averaging more than 600 a year, and a high proportion occurs here despite large yellow moose-crossing signs. “I’ve seen cars that hit moose and look like they’ve run into a cement wall,” Crawford said.

Maine’s moose population, which dwindled to about 3,000 to 6,000 in the 1930s, rebounded to 25,000 by the state’s last moose census (involving planes, not questionnaires) in 1985. Imposingly large moose--an adult bull stands 6 feet high at the shoulder and weighs more than half a ton--have been spotted ambling through schoolyards and flower gardens, taking a dip in a backyard pool, strolling within blocks of the state capital in Augusta.

The state keeps granting more licenses for its six-day moose hunt in October, from 1,000 in 1993 to 1,500 this year. The hunt is a major event, with spectators settling in with lawn chairs and picnic coolers at the weighing station. But hunters target bull moose instead of cows (“They want to shoot something with antlers,” said biologist Karen Morris of the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department), which limits the hunt’s utility in population control. So the number of moose has grown.

That is partly because many small farms have been abandoned: Maine had 400,000 fewer acres under cultivation in 1992 than a decade earlier. That farmland reverts to forest, and moose are fond of the young hardwoods that sprout where crops once grew.

An abundance of moose has created a bad news-good news situation in this rural region. On the one hand, moose-related accidents have climbed dramatically--from a few dozen a year in the 1960s to 300 or so by the late 1980s. With 658 reported in 1994 (some of that hike stems from reporting changes), moose crashes have been proclaimed a serious public-health problem in northern New England.

Maine moose seem to like roadsides. They enjoy what Morris called “the salt licks the Department of Transportation has kindly provided for them”--road salt left by the winter’s repeated de-icing. They get respite from tormenting clouds of black flies and mosquitoes that wait deep in the woods.

And because of their size, they tend to face down a threat--a speeding minivan, say--rather than flee. “You can blow the horn and the siren at them, and they don’t even look up,” said Crawford, pulling over for a closer look at a female munching the plants in a roadside bog. This moose, which probably weighed close to 800 pounds, trotted off when Crawford got out of the car--unusually sensible, he said.

It is no joke to slam into the largest terrestrial animal in eastern North America (bison weigh more, but moose are taller). In April, doctors from Maine and New Hampshire hospitals published research on victims of major moose collisions: of 23 patients, 20 suffered severe head, face or neck injuries; two were left quadriplegic; two died.

“They oughta take a machine gun and kill every moose in northern Maine,” said Deputy Chief Paul Davis of the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department, who has responded to more than 100 moose-auto crashes. “You could not design a more dangerous thing.”

At night on ill-lighted roads, he said, “they’re black, they’re big, they’re stupid, they’re windshield-high, and when they come through the windshield, they hurt.”

Machine-gun the moose? Members of the Moosehead Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce would be outraged. The good news of the moose boom is, “flatlanders” (anyone not born and raised in northern Maine) have a passion for moose-spotting. The same characteristics that are menacing on the highway make moose particularly tourist-friendly--they’re exotic yet plentiful, big enough to see from a distance and liable to keep feeding imperturbably as cameras whir.

A host of businesses has sprung up in nearby Greenville and Rockwood to enable visitors to go moose-watching in vans and buses, in canoes and pontoon boats, on seaplanes or on foot. John Rudin, a former white-water raft guide, bought a used Ford van so he could offer $30-per-person “moose safaris” along with mountain hikes. “When you see a busload of people freaking out over a moose, hanging out the windows, taking pictures, it seems like a good idea,” Rudin said.

Moteliers and entrepreneurs around 40-mile-long Moosehead Lake join in the monthlong Moose Mainea, featuring such events as a rowing regatta and Tour De Moose, a mountain bike race. Vacationers and residents are invited to register moose sightings at the Visitors Center (last year’s tally for the month: 3,526, probably including multiple spottings of the same moose). A Florida couple was there, fastening a small flag to a map to mark the campsite and roadside where they’d seen two young bulls. All the guests at Pat Zieten’s small bed-and-breakfast, from Massachusetts and New Jersey and Germany, were up and out early on a 43-degree morning, hoping to glimpse moose.

Downtown Greenville has stenciled its crosswalks--both of them--with moose hoof prints. Shops offer moose-motif merchandise: from ties, boxer shorts and cookie cutters to a $4.95 key ring with a small brown shape attached that the accompanying literature identified as “authentic real moose dropping sealed with a hardened lacquer finish.” At the Lodge at Moosehead just outside of town, guests can stay in the Moose Room, with a hand-carved headboard of bull moose, moose-antler drapery fixtures and moose-print shower curtain. “You would not believe some of the mooseaholics we get,” said owner Roger Cauchi, not ungratefully.

On a crystalline morning, one of Rudin’s safaris along the dirt roads north of Kokadjo came upon multiple moose. A bull was feeding in a field; another was stopping traffic on a one-lane bridge across Ragged Stream. A yearling was stripping the leaves off the red maples near the checkpoint where visitors enter paper-company timberland.

At Frenchtown Road, a shaggy bull shedding his winter coat was on his front knees nibbling at road salt. He barely paused when Rudin got out of his van to watch. “They’re kind of cute, in an awkward sort of way,” Rudin said. After the moose sauntered into the woods, his passage marked by snapping twigs, Rudin climbed back into his van and carefully--very carefully--drove south toward Greenville.