CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE MOOSE KIND

These pictures were sent to a gal I work with from her daughter. Her daughter received them from a girlfriend who lives in Timmins, Ont., Canada. The pictures are of a rare white moose found around that area.

There are so many moose in Canada that they have quite a problem with accidents on their roads & freeways. I saw a documentary a while ago where they said the moose come out of the bush to the roads to lick the salt on the roads in the winter. Hitting a moose is a little different than hitting a deer. Moose have longer legs and are A WHOLE LOT BIGGER!!! It would be like comparing a very emaciated small horse to a train locomotive! I could be mistaken, but they might even be a tad bit bigger than Elk & Caribou.

I suppose that I could Google & come up with the stats. But frankly, I would really rather not get into the boring technical stuff. Just trust me to say that I’m somewhere in the ballpark. And the difference between hitting a deer & hitting a moose with a car is: a deer will hit the front of the car & do a whole lot of damage. But when a car hit’s a moose - the only thing that comes in contact with the front of the car is the legs. Guess where the HUGE BODY ends up? Yeah, windshield for sure! Consequently, there are more fatalities with car/moose accidents than with car/deer accidents.

We have moose on Sugar Island, but they’re very rarely seen out of the bush. I feel very privileged to have had an encounter with a moose since I’ve moved up here. And no, I didn’t hit it with my car. It happened when I was renting the small house down the road from KFC. It was about 10:00 AM. I had to be at work at 11:00 so I had to leave to catch the 10:30 ferry. (Hmmm…I’ll save the calculations for catching the ferry as well as the fares for another blog.) I had just backed out of the driveway & had only driven about 20 yards, I was about 10 yards from the property line that had a line of thick trees. The moose came out of that tree-line, through the ditch & onto the road at a slow gallop. It was a very young one…almost as tall as a full grown one. When it came out it saw me, but it merely turned & continued at it’s same pace for another 40 yards or so straight down the road. It then turned into one of the neighbor’s driveway. I stopped & watched it keep going with it’s awkward gait.
I was going slow when he came out on the road, but I got to the point where he was just about 5 feet in front of my car! I just followed him along like that until he went off down the driveway. I had to stop on the road because I was laughing so hard that I couldn't’t see for the tears! I swear, it looked like it’s body rose 5 feet in the air ever time it took a step! I found out a couple of days later that it was probably one of three that my neighbor had seen going through his yard the same way. He told me that there was a male, a female & a calf. He said that the male had a “gimpy” leg. I didn’t hear any more about them.
A year or so after that, there was an article in the local paper with a picture of a moose crossing the I-75 expressway going out of town. There were a lot of reports from people who witnessed it swimming across the river from Sugar Island to the mainland & going through people’s yards in town on it’s way.
I have one more moose related story…sorry, but this one isn’t very funny. This happened around the same time as all the other sightings. Some guy was caught after he killed a moose on Sugar Island. They’re protected and on the “endangered species” list still here in Michigan. The guy’s excuse was that he thought that it was a deer! Besides the size issue, it wasn’t even hunting season! The guy ended up with a hefty fine & jail time.
I’ve been to the western part of the UP quite a few times and I’ve never seen any moose, although I’ve heard there are a lot of them over that way. There’s an auto dealership in a town named Newberry that advertises as being “The Moose Capital of the World”.
MPK actually went on a hunting trip in Canada & shot a moose. We have the rack mounted on the wall in the great room. But I’ll save that for another blog.