Moose in CT hard to track, even for the ‘moose man’
They call Jacob Harton “the moose man.”
He's always enjoyed the outdoors and has been fascinated by deer since he was a child. But as a college student he heard that there were moose in the northwest corner, and so he decided to see if he could find one.
“It took me a while until I finally saw the back end of one taking off right before it got dark outside in a swampy area,” he said.
Since then, Harton, who lives about 45 minutes from what's considered “moose country” (the Massachusetts border), has seen many moose, though he's careful not to come too close. He doesn't want to disturb them, and he is very aware of their tremendous size.
“I've had some in Connecticut literally walk feet away from me, like, full antlers and everything and it's scary,” he said. “As many times as I've seen them when you're close to one it's scary because they're huge.”
It's a pastime of his to try and track moose throughout the state. One time, Harton was looking for moose in the pouring rain, when he came across what he now knows was a mother moose and a calf.
“I was in the thick brush and something was running towards me and I couldn't see what it was. Then I saw the ears and I could tell just because of how tall they are,” he said. “What happened was the wind was blowing and it threw off my scent so they would think that I was behind them, so they started running toward me not realizing I was right there until I made a loud noise and they veered off and I saw them take off.”
There aren't a lot of moose in Connecticut. There are hundreds of moose sightings in the state every year, but as in the case of a moose seen recently in Windsor Locks, it's often difficult to tell if people are just seeing the same moose multiple times.
“There's just a larger volume of moose reports, just because of that one moose, than you would typically have in any given year,” said Department of Energy and Environmental Protection moose and deer biologist Andrew Labonte. “If there is a moose or two that's moving through the area, it's going to generate just an increased volume of moose sightings. That's what can make the number of reports fluctuate heavily from one year to the next. It's not necessarily an indication of the population.”
There is no official moose count in Connecticut, but the state does keep track in two ways. The first is through an online moose reporting tool. The second is via a survey conducted among deer hunters.
The two numbers often vary wildly and multiple people often see the same moose and report it multiple times.
For example, in 2019, the state's moose sighting tool
was used 46 times. That same year, hunters reported 103 moose.
A year later, there were 82 sightings reported by the general public, while deer hunters reported 126 moose. In 2021, publicly reported moose sightings dropped to 57, but hunterreported sightings rose significantly, to 223. The numbers stabilized in 2022, the last year for which there is complete data, to 81 moose reported by the public, and 142 moose reported by hunters.
While a state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection spokesperson said that five years is not really enough to identify any long-term population trends, it's estimated that there are about 100 moose within Connecticut's borders.
It's also difficult to track them, as they can be elusive, despite their size.
Labonte recalled a recent tour he led with agency leaders, attempting to find moose in an area where sightings had been reported. “There was snow up there. We saw no tracks and we saw no moose.”
Harton, though, knows what to look for, but even he doesn't see them every time.
“It's very rare to even see one in Connecticut. It's about being at the right place at the right time,” he said. “I look for the tracks. I look for the rubbings against the trees or their scat piles and everything like that because their tracks are very distinct because they're huge animals so we can tell the difference between a deer footprint and a moose footprint.”
Though there are not that many moose in the state, they do tend to capture the imagination when sighted.
“I think it's probably the size, just the sheer size of the animal. The antlers, I think, certainly draw a lot of people's attention,” Labonte said. “I don't think if you see a cow moose (a female moose) it's probably as dramatic a scene as seeing a big ol' moose with a big set of antlers.”
Whether or not moose are native to Connecticut is something of a debate. There have as yet been no fossil records of moose found in the state, though there are Native American stories of moose in the northwest corner suggesting large numbers of the animals.
“It's kind of conflicting reports,” Labonte said.
Connecticut is now at the southernmost edge of moose territory, and it probably was that way for recorded history. The first-ever photograph of a moose in the state was taken by a resident of Ashford in September, 1956, according to DEEP.
Though it's hard to know how many moose there are, Labonte believes the number of moose is decreasing in Connecticut. He cited two reasons: First is temperature.
Connecticut has always been as far south as moose are wont to wander, and as it gets ever so slightly warmer, they become more susceptible to “heat stress.”
The other is a parasite called brain worm. Connecticut is dense with deer, and while brain worms don't bother deer, they're a big problem for moose. The deer defecate the parasites, whereas for moose, the brain worm “burrows through their intestines, into their spinal column and up into their brain, and eventually they build up enough of these parasites that it causes them all sorts of issues.”
“Typically when there's a lot of deer around, there aren't a lot of moose,” Labonte said.