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For days before the two moose died, Mary Franzel did everything she could to scare them away.
She yelled. She stomped. She hurled kindling. But the mother and baby moose were unconcerned, mostly ignoring her aggression, continuing instead to munch on cedar boughs at her home near Clark Fork.
“Baby was a little more willing to trot off than mom was,” Franzel said.
Franzel, a veteran of living in rural North Idaho and a native of Minnesota (the land of moose and lakes), knew it was a bad situation. These moose were clearly habituated to humans, and the big ungulates, which are routinely 6 feet tall at the shoulders and weigh more than 1,000 pounds, can be dangerous.
But nothing worked, and Franzel had a sneaking suspicion why: She lives in rural suburbia. Her home is one of 75 or so houses on 5-acre plots 2 miles north of Clark Fork. She estimates more than half of her neighbors feed deer and moose throughout the winter.
“I’ve a watched a neighbor hand-feed (deer) peaches,” she said.
Feeding wildlife, particularly deer, elk and moose, can be dangerous. It habituates the large animals to human presence and can lead to aggressive behavior.
And the wrong kind of food, at the wrong time of year, can be deadly. But the two moose in Franzel’s yard looked healthy and were behaving normally, other than being unafraid of Franzel.
“I’ve seen some really scuzzy looking moose and these two looked beautiful,” she said. “Their coats were very lovely.”
And then they weren’t.
On Jan. 28, her dogs (who have a fenced-in outdoor area) were barking like they “meant it” and aiming their snouts toward the back of Franzel’s home. She walked into one of the back bedrooms and found the mother moose leaned up against her window, with her baby anxiously mewling nearby.
“First I thought the mom was taking a snooze,” Franzel said. “So I went to bang on the window then I was like, ‘No that’s not natural.’ ”
The mother moose was dead and her baby orphaned. Over…
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Source : yahoo
