The Story
A bull moose stands where the brush opens onto a meadow, palmate antlers spread against a pale sky, long muzzle lowered, the bell hanging under his throat. He is one visitor among six months of them.
The camera sits on a backcountry trail and ran from May through October 2023. Its owner calls it the Moose Cam, and the name is earned: moose come through often enough to claim the place. The rest of the cast is heavy too. Lynx turn up again and again, grizzlies and black bears pass, a few wolves walk the same line, and snowshoe hares hop through.
A calf shows up across the season, a little bigger at each pass. The calendar explains it. Calving runs from late May through early June, a newborn weighs about 28 pounds, and within five months it is about ten times that size. A calf stays with its mother for about a year, until she drives it off shortly before the next one arrives.
The bull's rack keeps its own schedule. Antlers start growing in April under velvet and can add as much as 8 inches in nine days. The velvet sheds in September as testosterone surges, and the rut runs from mid-September to mid-October, when bulls spar with those antlers. A camera running May to October spans nearly the whole build.
The trail that brings the moose also brings the animals that hunt them. Wolves, black bears and brown bears all prey on moose. Here the bears show a keen interest in something else entirely, the camera, which takes the brunt of their curiosity.
Food and cover decide where moose linger. Young, regenerating forest supplies shrubs and saplings for leaves in the growing season and twigs in winter, while standing timber gives summer shade for bedding. Moose are most active at dawn and dusk; this bull is out in plain daylight, a dark shape too big to miss.
