My Alaskan Adventures: Feeding The Moose

Life at the moose pens was always interesting and feeding the moose was sometimes an adventure. In some pens all we had to do was open the back of the feeder and dump food in from outside the fence. Then the moose come running up and you get to watch the dominant moose eat first while the others try to squeeze in for their turn. Sometimes they get very aggressive charging each other or even rearing up and kicking each other with their hooves. It's always fun to watch them from outside the pens. But it can be quite the heart racing moment from inside. In this photo I pulled up on the snow mobile and dumped the first 50lb pound bag of feed and then went back to the sled to get the next one only to see George the bull chasing the others around to get to the food first. Some of the more wild moose(those that haven't been bottle fed) keep their distance. But then there's the more habituated moose like George. He's not afraid of humans or his fellow moose so he tends to push most of them around sometimes literally! My goal was to ride in on the snow mobile as quick as possible and then dump the food and get out of there but some of the moose have an almost Pavlovian response to the sound of snow machines or ATVs so it makes things very interesting.

One on one snowy day in March I was coming back from Monte's loop(the feeder in the photo above) and rounded a corner at about 25 MPH only to see this moose caused road block. After my heart rate slowed down a bit I took this photo. Then I fired up the snow mobile and headed back to the cabin. I got a strange feeling after about a hundred yards and turned around to see George hot on my tail about 75 feet behind the snow mobile. I was going about 20MPH. So I sped up to about 35MPH and he stayed on my tail for at least another 1/4 mile. I was glad to see him break off because I was running out of road and wondered if he could put the breaks on in time if I slowed down.LOL! Sometimes life is stranger than fiction:)