Return of the Moose

The Adirondacks region is welcoming back the stately woodland mammal, but sightings continue to be elusive.

JIM STICKLES, A BIG GAME biologist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), has seen two moose in the Adirondacks, outside his annual surveys. One was in Saranac Lake, within the boundaries of Adirondack Park. The other showed up in his backyard.

“One day I was picking tomatoes, and I heard a twig snap,” he said. He looked over, expecting to see a deer. Instead, a moose appeared from the trees, just 30 yards away. But Stickles wasn’t surprised. “It’s not uncommon for people to have a moose walk through their backyard just out of the blue one day,” he said. “If people are coming to the Adirondacks with the goal of seeing moose, they’re probably going to see them from the roadside.”

The same couldn’t be said 40 years ago.

An elusive sighting: A bull moose paid a visit to the wetlands just outside the village of Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks in 2009. Moose were driven out of New York State by hunters and habitat fragmentation in the 1800s, but now they are staging a return. Photo courtesy of Wild Center.

AS STICKLES AND OTHER researchers study how moose and people might better coexist, others are trying to paint a clearer picture of moose populations in the Adirondacks. Researcher Jen Grauer, a PhD student at Cornell University, is currently working on a project that looks at juvenile moose in the Adirondack region. Grauer concurs that since moose came back to New York in the 1980s, the population has been slowly increasing, but the rate of increase has been much slower than predicted. Her estimates for moose are more conservative than Stickles’, at between 400 and 600.

In Grauer’s travels throughout the Adirondacks this past summer, she didn’t encounter a moose in the wild. She heard stories of sightings throughout the region — some people apparently see them all the time. But others have lived in the park their entire life without seeing them. Grauer says that could be because the distribution of the animals is patchy and clustered.

“A lot of the research in the state is examining what might be causes behind that slower population growth and any stagnation that we’re seeing,” Grauer said in a recent phone interview. “So our current research is looking a lot into the parasites that moose get and how they might have any population-level effects.”

One parasite Grauer is studying is the winter tick. Winter ticks, Grauer said, start a questing period in the fall where they seek out hosts. The parasite then latches onto the moose and stays there for the entirety of the winter (hence the name). In spring, they leave the animal to lay their eggs, and the cycle begins the next fall.

Winter ticks can be seen in tremendous numbers — upward of 100,000 ticks — on a single moose. When a moose has that many ticks drawing blood, there can be deleterious effects on the animal, causing it to lose energy. Particularly vulnerable are calves during their first winter; these young animals need all the energy they can muster to find food. With so many ticks, moose also need to replace tons of blood.

So far, Grauer has noticed that winter ticks usually congregate in moose populations with higher densities, such as the population in Maine. “In the Adirondacks, because our population and densities are much lower, we haven’t seen [winter ticks] to be as big of an issue yet,” she says. That could change, however, as moose populations continue to grow.

In the future, Grauer expects to look closer at deer pellets and snails, two important hosts for other parasites like brain worm and giant liver fluke that could infect moose. Currently, her team is keeping track of some juveniles with GPS collars over a two-to-three-year period. She is specifically interested in movement patterns and the source of any mortality.

“I think things are changing a lot, and we don’t quite understand the threats that parasites can pose now and over time with changes going on,” she says. “But I think the trajectory that [the moose are] currently on puts them in a pretty stable position to persist moving forward.”

While state biologists and academic researchers are working to determine the future of moose in New York, the public has become enamored of this large ungulate as well. And it’s driving tourism dollars in the park.

For the most part, the moose population of New York sticks to the Adirondack Mountains, although on occasion there are reports of individual animals in other parts of the state, including the Hudson Valley and Catskill region. Photo of Moose Pond near Lake Placid by Diana Robinson.

Researchers are now trying to find out causes behind the slower population growth of Moose in the New York. Among other things, they are looking at scat to check for parasites like brain worm and giant liver fluke that could infect moose. Photo of a researcher and her dog playing after finding a pile of moose scat in the Adirondacks, courtesy of Wild Center.

Brenda Valentine is the chairperson of the annual Great Adirondack Moose Festival, held each September in Indian Lake, New York. The weekend event attracts visitors from near and far for a host of fun and educational events, including a self-guided driving tour of the Moose River Plains (a known moose hangout), wilderness hikes, a moose-calling contest, and even helicopter rides over the vast terrain.

The idea for the festival came to Valentine several years ago, after she and her husband visited the Adirondack Experience, the famed museum located not far from Indian Lake. On the day of their visit, there was a speaker from the DEC who shared information with the assembled crowd about moose in the north country. The talk inspired Valentine, who originally comes from Baltimore and moved full time to the Adirondacks around 2004, and she started to conduct some on-the-ground investigating.

“I’m looking around during a coffee break, and I’m saying, I don’t know half of the people in this room,” Valentine said in a phone interview. “Where could they be from? So I engaged in a conversation — Troy, New York; Orange County; Rochester; I mean all over the place — so I put two and two together. People are really interested in the moose.”

She put together a proposal for the local chamber of commerce. The rest, as she said, is history. The inaugural event in 2011 was well-attended, and over the years more and more people from around the country have traveled to this tucked-away community in upstate New York for its celebration of the hooved animals.

“It brings in business,” Valentine said. “The hotels, the motels, some people book a year in advance.”

Still, the moose proves to be an elusive animal. In all the years of the Great Adirondack Moose Festival before the pandemic, there has not been a single sighting of a moose that Valentine is aware of. During the festival, a retired DEC official conducts hikes in the Moose River Plains to try to find some clues of a moose’s whereabouts. But, after all, the Adirondacks are not a zoo.

Valentine herself went 15 years without a moose sighting, but in 2021, she got lucky — twice. She and her husband were driving between the towns of Speculator and Indian Lake along a stretch of lonesome highway that is one of the more popular corridors to look for wildlife. A car in front of them put on their brakes suddenly, and sure enough there was a moose on the right-hand side of Route 30.

“My husband and I pulled over, and we got out,” she remembered. “Cell phones out to take photos, and the moose ran back down into the woods. And we sat there and waited and waited, the other car and my husband and I, and he finally came out of the woods and ran right across the road.” A few months later, she saw another one. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “For years, I carried around cameras in my car, hoping to see a moose. Two in one year.”

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