Radio-collared moose wanders into Duluth yard

Dawn Bloom had a nice surprise in her yard over the weekend: a moose, which she’s been waiting to see since she moved to the Northland eight years ago. “My husband, Steve, and I have made several trips to Michigan and Canada, including the entire Lake Superior Circle Tour, and each time we’ve hoped to see a moose, but never have,” Bloom said Tuesday. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is see a moose, and there you go: It’s in your own backyard, right?” But this scruffy adult cow moose isn’t just any ungulate visitor. She’s moose No. 4073, part of a long-term study on Minnesota’s dwindling moose population.

By: By John Myers, Forum Communications Co., The Jamestown Sun

Dawn Bloom had a nice surprise in her yard over the weekend: a moose, which she’s been waiting to see since she moved to the Northland eight years ago.

“My husband, Steve, and I have made several trips to Michigan and Canada, including the entire Lake Superior Circle Tour, and each time we’ve hoped to see a moose, but never have,” Bloom said Tuesday. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is see a moose, and there you go: It’s in your own backyard, right?”

But this scruffy adult cow moose isn’t just any ungulate visitor. She’s moose No. 4073, part of a long-term study on Minnesota’s dwindling moose population.

No. 4073 will be 9 years old in June and was originally captured and collared near Finland in February 2008, said Mike Schrage, biologist for the Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa.

Lakeside resident Ayesha Carlson saw the same moose at 8 a.m. Tuesday near 60th Avenue East and London Road. Her husband saw it on his way to work, and went back home to get her since she had never seen one.

“It would walk and look at the cars and people watching it,” Carlson said. “It seemed so calm, but I was worried because it was by a busy street.”

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for a moose to travel so far. It’s not clear why she settled on the North Shore on the eastern edge of Duluth.

“Her original home range until last fall was in the Nine Mile Lake area northeast of Finland,” Schrage said. “For whatever unknown reason, she started wandering down to the shore late last fall.”

Schrage said he thinks it’s the same cow spotted by a deer hunter near Island Lake north of Duluth last November.

A couple days after the Island Lake spotting, “she was seen in downtown Knife River, and we were able to verify it was 4073. She had been hanging out north of the Hwy 61 expressway between Knife River and Larsmont all winter,” Schrage said.

“A couple of weeks ago she made her most recent move back across the expressway and down to the area of Nokomis Restaurant and the Sucker River. We’re checking on her once or twice a week to make sure she’s alive and still in the area.”

Schrage told the Lake County News Chronicle last fall that the moose’s behavior in May had indicated she probably had a calf with her but, he said, since there was no calf with her in November, “she must have lost it sometime between now and then. Moose calves stick pretty close to their mothers for their first year.”

Schrage said he’d only seen three or four moose travel like No. 4073. “Most Northeastern Minnesota moose stay in the same 20-square-mile area for their whole life.”

The Fond du Lac band and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources are using radio-collared moose to find out where the animals go in hopes they can also learn why fewer calves are being born and fewer adults are surviving.