In Anchorage, Alaska, coping with moose is a major theme of life. The city is stuck with more moose – more than 1,000 at one point earlier this year – than it can handle.
The moose are everywhere, and they act like they own the place. They’ve been sighted bedded down next to a sewage-treatment plant near the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, lumbering across four lanes of rush-hour traffic, silhouetted atop a hill in sprawling Kincaid Park and even browsing the yard of a house not far from City Hall.
In the wild, you could easily overlook a 1,600-pound bull carrying a showy rack of antlers 6 feet wide, but in a city environment of straight lines and artificial colors, an Alaskan moose is hard to miss.
“It has reached the point where confrontations and other problems can’t be avoided,” Page Spencer, an ecologist with the National Park Service, told Smithsonian magazine for its December issue. “Conflicts are inevitable.”
These days, up to 300 moose stay within the city limits year-round. After the first snow falls, they’re joined by hundreds more streaming down from the Chugach Mountains to the east.
Most residents say they enjoy watching the moose and like having them around. “They’re icons,” Rick Sinnott said. “They remind us we live on the edge of a great wilderness. People appreciate that.” But people don’t necessarily appreciate ruined bushes and flower beds, injured pets, looted garbage cans and scary encounters.
“We’re constantly dealing with nuisance moose,” one exasperated homeowner said. He and like-minded others want the interlopers to vamoose. “They’ve lost their fear of man,” said Michael Vogel, a resident who has been trampled by a moose, “and once that happens it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets killed.”
Two Anchorage residents were killed last year and 11-year-old Hannah Strobbe narrowly escaped becoming the city’s third aggressive-moose fatality when an alarmed cow with a calf trounced her while she was playing near her home.
Run-ins aren’t unusual. And moose are particularly hazardous on roads. The more citywise among them look both ways before crossing the street, but others aren’t smart enough – or don’t live long enough to learn. In the 2002-03 winter season, 143 moose were killed by motor vehicles in the Anchorage area; a 13-year-old child died after one such accident, and property damage and other costs in Anchorage exceeded $2.5 million. Last winter the moose toll rose to 200.
Anywhere else, this kind of notoriety might get the moose declared Public Enemy No. 1, but not in outdoors-crazy, wildlife-loving Anchorage, where it seems hardly a day goes by without one or more creature-features prominently displayed on the front page of the morning papers.
Josephine Didiano lives in Palmer, a 45-minute drive from Anchorage. She didn’t blame the moose that jumped into her house through a window one morning last year. By the time three squad cars arrived, the frantic yearling had cause $7,000 worth of damage. “I love moose,” Didiano said. “I felt terrible when this one had to be shot.”
Kathleen Loughlin, a ski instructor, felt the same way after she was injured by a moose last year and saw one of the investigating police officers carrying a rifle. Loughlin had barged into a female with two calves while bicycling alone on a hilly Anchorage trail. She ended up on the ground, and the mother “tapped” her arm, breaking it. “I understood why she did that,” Loughlin said. “I didn’t want them to shoot her.” As it turned out, they didn’t.
But other residents want something done. Vogel, for example, favors a resumption of hunting in the Anchorage area. The last hunt, in 1983, turned into a public-relations fiasco, caused partly by sensational media coverage, leaving many in the city gun-shy about another one.
In a region that prides itself as the last refuge of rugged individualism, limits on development are widely regarded as unpatriotic if not downright perverse, but some moose-lovers are arguing for nothing less. They believe habitat preservation, special zoning measures and moose-friendly landscaping can enable man and beast to live together more harmoniously.
Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich said the city is moving in that direction. “We’ve incorporated moose migration paths into our land-use planning and have set aside large tracts of open space. We’re holding hearings now on proposals to manage growth, and we’re emphasizing mixed land use, which includes large-parcel residential development as well as dense development in town centers. The more progressive people in real estate business see this as a plus, but there’s still a segment opposed to zoning limits, so it’s controversial.”
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