The morning calm was shattered by my wife's yelling from upstairs. "Look out the living room window! Hurry!"
Could it finally be our moose? We first saw moose tracks in the snowy yard the week before Christmas. Since then there have been three other sets of tracks, but to date all we'd seen was tracks. Maybe that would change today. I sat down my coffee mug and ran to the living room window. And this is what I saw near the bottom of our front steps:
He was a young bull, probably facing his first winter alone. He had not dropped his antlers yet, but that would be happening soon. Bulls drop their racks in winter; they are much more able to work through trees and heavy snow without the big antlers slowing them down. Typically, the bigger the rack, the earlier it is dropped. This youngster's small rack was still hanging on.
My wife had been about to take our dog Katie out, and she just happened to look out the window before coming downstairs and out the front door. It is a good thing she did, because a well placed moose kick would have been the end of our little Shih Tzu.
We watched through the window for a several minutes as he ate sticks off the birch trees just in front of the house. He glanced our direction for a brief moment, but quickly turned back to his birch buffet. I decided to go out onto the porch to see what his reaction would be. The porch is pretty high off the ground, with about twelve steps down to the ground, so I was safe from attack. I gently opened the door and peeked down at him. He turned and stared right at me, no more than five feet from the bottom step.
He must have seen that I didn't have a gun. Or maybe he just wasn't old enough to perceive me as a threat to him. Or maybe he knew he could stomp me into a pulp without even working up a sweat. Whatever the reason, he quickly turned back to his breakfast. I stood there in the cold watching for as long as I could stand the cold. Before heading inside, I made my way about halfway down the steps, snapped a couple more photos within ten feet of him, then went back to warmth and my coffee.
After refilling my mug, I came back in the living room. Someone else was very curious about this young bull:
Abby the cat and I watched the moose munch on twigs for perhaps thirty minutes. He then wandered around the area, finally making his way to the back of the house. After some more snacking out back, he made his way to the small copse of woods at the back of the yard. He found a nice flat spot and settled down for a bit of rest.
He rested in the woods for several hours, then he was gone. In the weeks since then, we have seen moose in our yard at least a dozen times. We have also seen moose in our neighborhood numerous other times. Sadly, we have yet to see this baby bull again. Hopefully he has found a good and safe feeding ground, and will come for another visit someday.
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