Moosehead Region Hunting Report: October 25, 2007
Last spring I was out harvesting moose lungs again, this time on Toe-of-the -Boot. Say what? In recent years quite a few young moose have died of heavy tick infestations and/or lung worms, which is a rather new and very important development for moose “managers.” Those moose are generally approaching age 1. Bigger moose are much better able to handle tick loads. The speculation is that the tick populations grew following the build up of the moose population. If recruitment into the population of older animals is down, “allowable harvest,” as a percentage of the population at large, may be changing downward.
We need to investigate, but how? It is nigh impossible to get good information on the magnitude of this loss. And we aren’t sure whether the loss is constant or periodic. These moose tend to die in late winter when not many people are in the woods to notice and when getting around is difficult due to rutted and/or soft roads, high water, and patchy snow cover. Aerial composition counts which could be compared to herd composition counts done in the 80s are out because yearlings aren’t too readily distinguished from older animals. What to do?
NH has taken the approach of radio-equipping calf moose & monitoring their survival. Preliminary results don’t look good for the moose. We could follow suit except for the expense. And even then, it is doubtful sample size would be sufficiently large to be sure the rates obtained are representative. The only practical answer appears to be to follow trend information such as hunter success rates, reported sighting rates, incidence of road kill, and possibly age structure of the harvest.
We are roughly quantifying the degree of hair loss (Moose try to scrape off the ticks), and examining lungs to check for necrosis, i.e. lung capacity lost due to lung worms. It isn’t bad once you get past the flies & ticks. You lift the front leg, skin out the front of the thorax, snip a few ribs, and the lungs are right there. I think I’ll put in for a Tyvex suit. Fortunately, I remembered to bring along a bar of soap & a towel. Before I arrived the warden had passed a metal detector over the moose. I think the most plausible cause is that maybe that moose was trying to live in habitat which had gone by, which could mean this isn’t happening everywhere.
