Moose hunt

[moosehunter]

I drew a Maine moose tag. Bull. Zone 3. October 9-14. 
I could tell you that I am excited but that would be an understatement.
My wife and I will be staying with Pappy & Gram (FF members) at The Outback. A FF search would probably bring up a thread or two about The Outback. We love going there. 
8) 8) 8) 8) 8)
mh

[WV Sawmiller]

   Congratulations. Let us know when the BBQ will be ready. smiley_clapping digin_2

[Old Greenhorn]

Congrats. I have no idea where that zone is, but good luck. I hope you find one without ticks.
 I tried to look up The Outback, but those two words are used for a lot of other stuff and I gave up looking after a bit.

[moosehunter]

https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=7671.0

Try that

[Old Greenhorn]

OK, got it now, read the whole thread. Beautiful place, great thread!

[SwampDonkey]

You have a nice place to stay at, and them moose are mighty tasty. ;D

[thecfarm]

Better make room in the freezer!!!

[Southside]

Nice camp. What township is it in?

[petefrom bearswamp]

Mike, wish you luck with your hunt.
Those tags arent easy to come by.

[SwampDonkey]

Nice camp. What township is it in?

I believe he is in Wallagrass, Aroostook Co.

[Southside]

Do you know where the best place is to shoot a moose? 

[Old Greenhorn]

Either in the ear or right next to your truck, or both. :D

[SwampDonkey]

I'm sure Glenn could show you a couple. ;D 

I don't hunt moose myself, but they aren't hard to find in these parts. Where I'm working right now there's lots of moose poo and I find beds all the time in the meadowy places. We've thinned them out a bit over the last 5 years with a longer season and more licenses, they needed thinned out.

[Southside]

When it's standing on your trailer was always the answer we would give folks when they asked.  :D I have seen guys shoot them on the far back side of a chopping, down an embankment on the curve in the road. Good luck with that fellas. 

[SwampDonkey]

We haul'm out with Polaris SxS here. ;D

Polaris power pulling out Big Bull !! Moose hunting Ignace Ontario Canada Polaris UTV side by side - YouTube

[Old Toad]

Sorry, moose hunting is overrated.
Best *DanG vacations ever when we did not shoot one, just saying, bring a bird dog and a light shotgun, grouse hunting is superb..
Not to kill a good time, once the shot is taken, it is all blood, sweat and a monster gut pile. Best have a truckload of ice and more than 2 very stout, sharp knives, maybe a new olive oil'd chain saw.
Ever since them do-gooder turkey jerkey's imported the vile 2 legged tick bags into Maine the moose have been fighting a loosing battle against ticks.
If you get bit by a Lone Star Tick watch out for the meat allergies. And don't tell me they are not in Maine.
Good luck!

My answer on where to shoot a moose? On a stone wall next to the road.

[SwampDonkey]

A lot of folks come for the stories and camp cook'n, if you have a good story teller and a great cook. :D

I like observing wildlife more than hunting. Haven't hunted in 30 years. I still get a piece of moose meat once in awhile gifted. ;D

[Mooseherder]

Zone 3 should be productive for you.  The odds are in your favor.   Pappy lives about an hour from here the way the road wind's.  Probably 20 minutes if it were a straight line.  We are both in Zone 3.   This guy was at the tire store waiting room.  Too bad I've seen him twice this month.

 

[Southside]

Any broccoli still around? 

[Old Greenhorn]

My Dad and 3 or 4 close friends went Moose hunting in Newfoundland for about 7 or 8 years running in the late 60's. I was raised on that meat. My uncle George, who owned a brake shop and did fab work on the side built a refrigerated trailer for bringing the meat home, it looked like a pop-up when folded and the rack went on the roof (on a 'roof rack rack'  :D) and that trailer got a lot of attention on the road and he got a lot of calls to build them, which turned into the ruck fab business my cousin runs now. 
 Another guy in the group was a Dentist, but also a amateur butcher and had a full butcher kitchen setup in his basement with freezers and coolers just for their moose.
 The guide service they used were a couple of local guys they hired directly, having given up on using the outfitter years earlier, and they had a Weasel they used for bringing in the gear the last 10 miles and fetching the animals they shot. The guides would help them quarter and bag the meat and cut the antlers off, but all the butchering was done back at home.
 The stories I heard as a boy are still with me in the dim light of time. It took them 5 days of travel to get to where they pitched a tent. 2 days to Newfoundland, then 3 more to get on the ground after the ferry trip, driving one lane roads, and hooking up with their guides, then moving everything to the weasel and getting where they were headed.
 By all accounts they had a great time every year and shared whatever meat they got with the group, so it didn't matter who shot what. I still have one of the racks hanging in a shed. As I said, I was raised on that meat and even though we had plenty, I never tired of it. My Aunt Julia had her own little cookbook of recipes she created over the years which included things like Moose Fondue (sirloin tip cooked in hot oil) that was a killer. I one time ate so much I was feeling poorly for nearly 2 days. She would share her secrets with my Mom and we had some mighty fine dinners. 
 OH, and my Pop would always throw a shotgun in for grouse for camp, but he got fairly good at popping their heads off with a 30-06 too. ;D
 I still miss it. 
 I wonder too what the ticks are like up in Newfoundland? I know it's devastating the herds in Maine.

[Mooseherder]

There's a lot of Broccoli being grown locally by Farmers and the Moose love it.  I had a Moose walk thru the garden when my Broccoli was small.  They left it alone. It's been a cold wet summer. The woods are a Rain Forest this year.  Moose tracks are deep.  I have a cam on the garden but I haven't checked it yet.
If the trails dry some I will check my trail cams.  They have about 6 weeks on since last check.  I just herds them.  :D

[Southside]

Ya the ticks take their toll, but the forest in northern Maine has changed significantly over the past 40 years.  

First look back a century by reading Helen Hamlins book "Nine Mile Bridge".  She and her husband Curly spent three years at the Nine Mile Bridge Warden camp back in the '30s.  That camp is nine miles east of the Quebec border crossing at Lac Frontier.  Those were the days of axe and cross cut saw felling, horses, mules and bateaus using the river to move logs and gear, farms along the Allagash and St John river for food and lodging.  They were also the days of mature spruce and fir timber, it was before the fire, before a significant spruce bud worm problem, just the normal cyclical ones.  The woods was mature timber, heavy canopy, cedar in the swamps and a typical edge of the boreal conifer forest.  In her book Helen speaks of seeing countless deer, it was a staple for them, and one moose in three years, just one. She would travel to Clayton Lake, St Paphile, Escort Station, Lac Frontier, and Daquuam for softball games and other human activity, so they saw some road time.  If you have ever been up in that neck of the woods, imagine the trip from Nine Mile to Escort in 1930 something. Having done it countless times in a modern pickup I can assure you that must have been a trip. 

In the 1940's the big fire came that burned what - 200,000 + acres if I recall correctly.  Chain saws and rubber tired skidders showed up in the '60s, more timber was harvested faster than before.  Welcome the late '70s and the spruce bud worm knocked on the door, the regeneration from the '40s and harvesting from the '60s made for a perfect environment for the worm to flourish, and it did.  Clear cutting became a significant method to get ahead of the worm as it was the only resort to remove all that same aged stand, that went on until the early '90s when the worm was gone and the politics shifted away from large clear cutting due to surface water quality issues.  

The moose population grew steadily in the late '70s and '80s to the point where the season opened back up.  Why?  They had lots and lots of food available.  Maple and Alder regeneration in the clear cuts was a perfect source for them year round.  Of course, those same clear cuts were a problem for deer.  They don't do well in 6' of snow so they yard in ceadar swamps and such in the winter, but there are only so many of those and once the Maple and Alder re-gen get tall enough the buds are past what a deer can browse on, so in the later '80s, '90s and '00s moose were aplenty and deer populations suffered.  Growing up it was considered a good season if you saw a legal shooter during the season, which is a month long.  Not that you got one, you saw one. Many years doe permits didn't exist in that neck of the woods, but you better be careful driving at night or you might fill your moose tag via your State Farm claim.  

Herbicide aerial application became a big thing in the '90s to promote the spruce and fir while removing the maple and alder, now fast forward nearly 30 years and what do you have?  A spruce and fir dominated canopy that has closed in, not much maple and alder at say 4'-10' tall available by the 1000's of acres and a declining moose population.  History has repeated itself.  They don't have the food.  Yes the ticks kill some, hard winters kill some, etc, but if those funny looking cattle can't browse on buds all day long at head height then they can't get the calories to survive.   

[SwampDonkey]

My area of NB was moose dominated. Never saw more than 6 or 7 deer a year even 40 years ago. When you went up the Tobique river or the Miramachi there were large herds of deer, the lakes and streams had deer paths around, which were mostly started by caribou that the deer wiped out with disease. Not much for deer before 1910 at all, they were here but sparse and mostly south. Became more common and widespread with European settlement. It's considered an invasive species. The fall big game hunt up here was moose, caribou and bear back in my great grandfather's day. Parker wrote a series of books and has several old photos, not a white tail deer in any photo from the late 1800's to the early 1900's. He was a wildlife biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service. When the guides and outfitters went to Boston every year promoting big game hunting in those years, they promoted moose and caribou.

This sums it up for NB deer the last 50 years.

https://nbdatapoints.ca/natural-resources/forestry/the-missing-deer'

“In 1900,” wrote Moore (a guide and outfitter on the Tobique), “there were very few deer in the Tobique–Nepisiguit country, but caribou were there in great numbers.” He attributed the precipitous subsequent decline of the caribou to a rapid increase in the deer population. This, he assumed, led to competition between the two species for a limited food supply, and to the caribou, now supposedly under-nourished and weakened, becoming more susceptible to disease.”

Ticks and moose calves.
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[Old Greenhorn]

Very informative updates from SS & SD, thank you both. It puts that cycle in perspective and shows how consequences can take some serious turns.
 So the Maine population is in decline due to these ticks and it looks like the ticks are moving north too fast. Still curious if Newfoundland is a bit more insulated because it's and Island, or if the ticks still find a vector to their target. I imagine they do. 

 I have long been calling the whitetails around here the 'rats of the woods' because of all the damage they do. Some disease has hit them, and I'm sure in another 50 years it will be a lot worse. Long Island still has a deer population for instance and back in the 50's and 60's they were hunt able. But these days the disease and sickness makes the herd look like the walking dead and few harvests produce edible meat from what I can gather. Habitat is shrinking and there are no predators. Most all hunting is just to reduce the herd and it's not a pretty sight.
We have few predators for them in the Catskills beyond coyotes and a few cats, but the bigger cats are coming, I can feel it.

 The cycle never stops.

[Old Toad]

.............
We have few predators for them in the Catskills beyond coyotes and a few cats, but the bigger cats are coming, I can feel it.

The cycle never stops.

Yes there is a magnificent Mountain Lion in our County, many have seen it.
I guess they got tired of eating joggers in Kalifornia, moved east.