Deer

In my last post I eluded to more stories from our trip up North.  On our first full day in Algonquin Park Deneen and I went with half the group with Alexis as our instructor and guide for the day.  He had seen a moose on his morning scout so we set off to follow its tracks. 

Above and below are moose tracks on the side of highway 60 which runs through the park.  The track below is about 4 inches long.  Not even that big by moose standards.

Moose trail through 3 foot deep snow. The bottom of the tracks is WAY down.

Alexis leading the way into the woods as we follow the trail.

A very snowy forest awaited us. The snow had piled up on everything. Below is one of many stumps that received a mushroom cap of snow. It gave the bush (forest) a surreal and truly Northern feel.

This area transitioned from Spruce and Fir to mixed hardwoods. There where very few if any saplings here above 5 or 6 feet tall, only fairly mature trees or small, battered ones like in the pictures above and below. They where so heavily browsed by the moose that each year the new shoots could only spread out to be eaten again with out ever getting much taller.   

Close up of a moose eaten branch held by my mittened hand. Notice the broken off appearance, deer family, including moose, have no upper incisors and therefor what they bite is more broken or torn than cut. Moose, in winter, can eat up to 45 pounds of twigs, buds and bark a day. An adult bull usually weighs about 1100 pounds (numbers from Mammals of Algonquin Provincial Park published by The Friend of Algonquin Park and converted to pounds by me).

Moose have an interesting way of getting at branches that are taller than they can comfortably reach.  They just push the tree over, often straddling it. This tree was fractured under the assault. Below is a closeup of some hair left after the operation.

We also passed other sign of the moose as we followed their trail.  Fresh moose scat, (its big) we encountered several times.

More moose hair, this one probably from its back.

And beds.  Moose and other animals in the deer (cervid) family lay down often as they forage and browse in order to fully digest their food.  They eat a lot at once, swallowing into the first chamber of their four chambered stomach, then go lie down to bring some up a little at a time to re-chew and swallow into the next section of their stomach, in this way they can spend more time on the alert for predators.

The ruler is 2 feet across, the bed is something like 5 feet across the long way.

After several hours of quietly moving through the woods trailing the moose we caught up to them. They were very aware of our presence and pretty tolerant of us. Turned out to be three moving together, we knew there were at least two by the tracks. The video below explains more about the many minutes we spent with them.