Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
view mirror, there was a big cow moose, her hindquarters sprawled across the centerline and her head
pointed back to my left. I yelled, “Moose!” to my wife, and just as she turned to look, we both saw the
animal leap to its feet and speed back into the woods in the direction from which it had just come.
It wasn't difficult to reconstruct what had happened. The moose must have shot forth from the woods
with her throttle wide open. She crossed open strip, ditch, shoulder, and part of the highway in a flash,
nearly hitting the back of our car. At that point she must have slammed on her brakes and skidded on
the asphalt surface. Her hindquarters went down, slid, and pivoted her 180 degrees. It was a remarkable
and frightening display of this “slow” animal's speed!
If this story seems unlikely, just consider the mathematics of it. Sixty miles per hour equals eighty-
eight feet per second. A car traveling at fifty miles per hour moves at seventy-three feet per second, and
a moose in a hurry covers ground at roughly forty-four feet per second. The flicker of movement that I
caught out of the corner of my eye meant that the moose had started to emerge from the woods slightly
ahead of our car. The moose would have covered the distance to the edge of the travel lane, approxim-
ately fifteen feet, in one-third of a second; meanwhile, our car would have traveled about twenty-four
feet, so that the rear of the car would barely have passed the moose as it reached the pavement. Then
the moose slammed on its brakes and skidded as it hit the pavement.
Just as I was printing the very last chapter in this manuscript, the phone rang. It was our daughter
Suzy, who asked in a very shaky voice, “Can you come and get me? I just hit a moose!” A yearling bull
moose had come charging out of the woods, directly into her path. Thanks to her quick thinking, she'd
avoided injury; thoroughly indoctrinated with the knowledge that she could be killed in a head-on col-
lision with a moose, she had slued her car sideways so that she struck the moose only a glancing side
blow. Unfortunately, the moose suffered a badly broken front leg and had to be dispatched by the game
warden, but there's a long waiting list for moose meat, so the meat, prime at that age, was salvaged.
Suzy had heard time and again about the speed of a running moose and knew, in an intellectual sense,
that they could emerge from the woods at a frightening clip. The reality, however, was a revelation that
she summed up by saying, “I still can't believe how fast they move!”
May is the worst month for moose-and-car collisions, at least in the more southerly portion of the
moose's range. Here there are plenty of paved highways where salt is used in winter to melt snow and
ice. This salt ends up in wet areas beside the road, creating artificial salt licks. Such sites are easily
identified: they resemble a wet barnyard just traversed by a herd of cattle, the water muddy and the
ground a soggy mass of great hoofprints.
Although moose come to these salty places all through the warm months, they use them far more
heavily in May. Why? Because the aquatic plants that supply moose with sodium and other nutrients
haven't yet grown enough that moose can feed on them. With moose heavily concentrated during May
along paved highways, and cars zipping along these roads at high speed, it's inevitable that collisions
disastrous to moose, car, and occupants will occur.
Moose are especially hard to see at night because of their very dark color; often the first thing a
motorist sees are the long gray legs, which show up a little better than the body. Moose love the accu-
