The Story
Head low in a meadow gone gold, a bull moose feeds broadside below the peaks of Grand Teton National Park. A band of yellow trees blazes behind him, and above them the blue rock goes straight up.
It is fall in the Tetons, the season this film follows, with moose, bugling elk and coyotes all active and hikes to Delta Lake and Moose Ponds along the way. The bull holds the cover frame, and he repays a closer look.
The moose is the largest member of the deer family. A mature animal carries a hump over the front shoulders and a flap of skin under the throat called a bell, larger and rounder on a bull than on a cow. Coats run generally dark, black to brown or grayish brown, and a bull's face is black. The long, drooping muzzle is down in the meadow here, and the palmate antlers rise above it. On a big bull they can reach five feet across.
Fall sets the agenda for a bull moose. Minnesota's wildlife agency puts the moose rut from mid-September to mid-October; Alaska's biologists give late September and early October. The velvet that covers growing antlers sheds as testosterone surges in September. In the rut, bulls spar with those antlers, grunt to court cows or challenge rivals, and splash their antlers with urine, a scent that entices cows to breed.
Otherwise a moose keeps its own company. It is the least social deer, fairly solitary outside the mating season and not territorial, and in this frame the bull has the meadow to himself.
Rocky Mountain National Park advises looking for moose among willows and aquatic plants, along rivers and around lakes. Fall food shifts to twigs of willow, birch and aspen, and an adult needs about 20 kg of it a day. Once the rut ends, bulls drop their antlers in late fall or early winter to save energy for the cold. The mountains make a famous backdrop; head down in the frame, he gives them no notice.
