The Story
To reach the bucket, a keeper ducks under the throat of a bull moose. The bull allows it, coat hanging in wet spikes, antlers still on his head, long muzzle pointed out over the snow.
This is feeding time at a moose park in Sweden, with bare trees behind and black buckets on the white ground. No deer species is less social than the moose, so a mixed group around the buckets is not the usual picture. The keeper knows these animals by name, age and family, and goes down the line making introductions.
The bulls come first, and they split the antler calendar between them. The six-year-old dropped his in January. The three-year-old beside him still has his, which the keeper puts down to youth. Minnesota DNR says antlers are usually shed in December and January. Bulls lose them after the rut to save energy for winter, and new ones start growing in April.
With a person in the frame for scale, a moose stops being a number on a field guide page. A large Alaska bull can reach 1,600 pounds, and a moose can eat up to 70 pounds of food a day. The calm here is one side of the animal. Moose usually flee, but more people in Alaska are injured by moose than by bears yearly, and they can turn aggressive when harassed or when hungry and tired in deep snow.
Then the young. One calf was born in May and has a twin sister, and twins are common in moose. A calf weighs about 28 pounds at birth and grows to about 10 times that within 5 months, so this one meets the snow already a big animal. Their big sister is here too, one year old, and the mother is the big cow on the other side.
Next year, the keeper says, the calf will look like her big sister, which leaves one more neck to duck under.
