Urban moose lock antlers, die near UAA
MATING SEASON: Rotting carcasses found 50 feet from college's arts building.
adn.com
By PETER PORCO
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: September 25, 2004)
In a stand of black spruce 50 feet from the parking lot of the University of Alaska Anchorage Arts Building on Friday lay the evidence of a primal struggle to the death.
Two bull moose in rut had battled among the skinny trees, locked their antlers in a fatal tangle and afterward fell down to die.
A state biologist guessed the bulls had killed each other a week before or earlier. Their maggot-laden carcasses were not discovered until Friday morning.
The moose were on their sides and at a right angle to each other, but their heads were locked back to back. The face of the smaller of the two bulls was forced into the ground, while the other's head was wrenched around to face the sky, its tongue hanging to the side.
Word quickly spread through the campus and to Alaska Pacific University, on the other side of the woods from UAA.
Scores of visitors came through much of the day. They stared in amazement, some holding their noses, snapped photos and commented on the sadness of two magnificent creatures reduced to twisted inanimate hulks crawling with flies.
"That's just a tragedy," said Ben Lawson, a UAA electrician who often sees moose on the campus from his perch in a 40-foot high cherry picker. "You'd think the horns would break."
But moose antlers are not likely to break, even when animals as large and powerful as these, estimated to be 1,000 pounds or more, try with all their might to free themselves from the mesh of antler tines and palms, said biologist Rick Sinnott of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
"They're hard bone and somewhat resilient," Sinnott said. "They won't just shatter." The animals can exert only so much leverage with their necks. "They do sometimes break the tines, but these guys were locked into the palms," he added, referring to the broad, flatter part of the antler.
The thin trunk of a spruce tree lay beneath both moose, with one of their antlers wedged tightly against it. Sinnott said the tree was somehow involved and "contributed to their being locked."
A hole in the ground the size of a small Jacuzzi had been dug where the larger moose lay. Lawson imagined a scenario in which the smaller animal weakened first and fell. The larger bull, he guessed, struggled to pull himself free, dragging the other and kicking out the dirt, until he too collapsed from exhaustion.
Sinnott does not think the two moose died from starvation. "Bull moose during rut don't eat much anyway," he said. "They put on so much fat during the summer ... lots and lots of fat."
Instead, the animals probably choked to death. They got turned on their sides, and their huge, compartmentalized stomachs, "like four big vats of liquid," regurgitated mash into their windpipes, Sinnott said.
"They can aspirate that stuff," he said.
Death by locked antlers does not happen often to moose, but it's also not rare, according to Sinnott.
"It must happen dozens of times across the state," he said. He's seen it in the Anchorage area, including Fort Richardson, four or five times in the last 10 years.
Dennis Daigger, a 57-year-old photographer enrolled in a class at the college, was taking pictures of the carcasses Friday morning. He had smelled the moose on Monday and even came close to finding them that day, he said.
A former hunting guide and a zoologist by training, Daigger recognized plentiful signs of moose and their struggle as he walked his dog on a trail through the woods -- small trees broken in half or leaning over, tufts of moose hair in the brush and rut pits in the middle of the trail.
Rut pits are shallow holes that a bull will dig and fill with his urine. The bull stomps in the pit, splashing urine on his antlers, neck and chin to attract cows. The pits held rainwater on Monday, but they still smelled of urine, Daigger said.
Had Daigger turned to the side and peered carefully through the brush, he would have seen an antler only 30 feet away, he said.
"They're so single-minded," he said of the bulls in rut. "It's like a 22-year-old in a bar on a Saturday night."
The stink grew stronger as the week wore on. At 8:30 a.m. Friday, someone called the campus police, who in turn called Anchorage police. There was a chance the smell was coming from a human cadaver, authorities said.
An Anchorage police officer arrived about 9:10 a.m. with a K-9 dog. The dog had cut its foot earlier, however, and it re-injured the foot searching through the woods, so it was pulled back, said Sgt. Anthony Henry, supervisor of the Anchorage K-9 unit.
The Anchorage police officer and a campus police off-duty dispatcher eventually located the entwined moose about 9:30 a.m.
People soon started driving up to the edge of the parking lot. They walked gingerly through the muskeg and spruce and stood around the dead moose, some for only a few minutes.
Bobby Woofter, a 23-year-old theater major, took out his cell phone and called an uncle who Woofter said enjoys biology.
"It's Bobby," he said into the phone. "It's noon, and I got something you got to see. Two bull moose fought, locked horns, and died."
Woofter gave his uncle the location and soon left for class, saying to no one in particular, "It looks too strange to be real."
Brook Kintz, an environmental scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, showed up a little later when few people were around.
"Wow," Kintz said more or less to himself. "The size of them. So they led to their own demise, eh? Wow -- trees knocked over. They're getting devoured by maggots. Absolutely fascinating. ... Life and death in Alaska."
Sinnott said he thought he understood what made people want to see a couple of big dead creatures whose hair was twitching with insect larvae.
"It was a sense of amazement at the power and majesty of these animals that can do this to themselves, fight and get locked up and fight to the death," he said. "You can just imagine the struggle."
Sinnott was hoping Friday to locate trappers to take the moose for bait meat. The Department of Fish and Game would want the heads to sell them at auction, he said.
Daily News reporter Peter Porco can be reached at pporco@adn.com or 257-4582 |
