Where a dead moose draws a crowd in northern Vermont

When a moose arrives at Island Pond, one of its teeth is placed in a small envelope. His ovaries come in a glass of alcohol. Hunters must bring them in after gutting the animal in the field.

They may find it difficult to identify the organs. “That’s what this makeshift cutting board is for,” said Nick Fortin, a wildlife biologist at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. “To actually rid the ovaries of what they bring us.”

Fortin has been working at the control station at Island Pond every October for years. This is how his team collects all sorts of data.

“We measure antlers, collect DNA and count ticks,” he said. “This year we are looking for COVID, actually in moose. Just looking.”

A moose usually arrives wedged in the back of a pickup truck or towed on a trailer. Then Fortin or another biologist climbs onto the loading area. They wear rubber gloves and bibs. It’s a damn job.

“Then of course we weigh them, which is what everyone cares about, which is how much they weigh,” Fortin said. “That’s the part where you have to lift legs and attach chains, and that part requires a lot of brute force.”

The first day of the regular season is slow. By noon no moose had arrived. But people drove on and checked the board that lists how many moose have been killed that season.

Some stop here every year like Tammy Cookson.

“We’re coming from about an hour away — the city of Cabot,” she said. “I have my son with me who is 21 now but we probably came up here when he was 8 or 10 years old.”

Back then, moose hunting was much larger in the state. Vermont moose population in the 1990s shot up.

In the early 2000s, the Fish and Wildlife Department issued over 1,000 permits nationwide.

“There were hundreds of people here,” Fortin said. “It was quite a spectacle for the town to see all the moose coming in. The fire department used to hold a chilli cook-off for the people. It was basically a celebration for the town of Island Pond.”

Before that, however, for almost 100 years, There were hardly any moose in it the state because of widespread clear-cutting and hunting.

Today, most moose live in the upper right corner of Vermont. But biologists say The population here is not healthy. An important reason is a tiny parasite called winter ticks. You can enjoy moose by the tens of thousands.

Fortin sees the effects of these ticks when he looks at the ovaries that hunters bring in.

“They have a scar where they released an egg,” he said. “So obviously if she had survived, she would have given birth to that many calves in the spring.”

In a healthy population, many moose give birth to twins—up to half of all pregnant adults. That is not the case here.

“We almost never see twins anymore,” Fortin said. “And then we see a lot with zero.”

Zero embryos because the moose are not healthy enough to reproduce.

Other dates indicate problems: moose here are thinner than they were 20 years ago. And that’s what a recent three-year study found only over half of the calves survive the first winter – most of these deaths were Attributed to winter ticks.

However, according to Fortin and other state biologists, there is something that would help keep ticks at bay. It has fewer moose. That’s where hunters come in.

“We help moose by reducing density – the population density that reduces the number of parasites. It’s a simple density-dependent relationship where there are more moose when there are more ticks,” Fortin said. “We know if we reduce moose numbers a little bit, it will probably help them a lot.”

Not only state biologists say that.

“If half of the calves are dying from winter ticks, it makes perfect sense to try management approaches that address this problem,” said Dr. Tiffany Wolf, wildlife epidemiologist and veterinarian at the University of Minnesota. “Density reduction is probably the most strategic approach.”

However, others have raised concerns, such as Sarah Hoy, who studies moose and wolves at Michigan Technological University.

“I would say it’s a really risky approach for a number of reasons,” she said.

For one, in the elk population she studies, the association between elk and tick counts is not that straightforward.

“This idea that reducing moose density will decrease tick abundance — I’d say we don’t have evidence for that,” Hoy said.

And there are some deer in this area of ​​Vermont. They also carry winter ticks and other parasites, such as brainworms, which are typically fatal to moose. Hoy says while you have lots of deer aroundthese parasites will also be here.

Still, the Department of Fish and Wildlife is betting that fewer moose will solve the tick problem. They’ve seen this in other parts of Vermont and the Northeast as well.

Because of this, for the second straight year, the department issued 100 hunting permits in this corner of the state, home to about 1,000 moose.

In the early afternoon a hunting party had arrived with a moose. With him came a crowd: small children on their parents’ shoulders, old women with their dogs, men who had just taken their garbage to the landfill, everyone here to watch the action.

Her moose was a bull with small antlers. A gray tongue poked out of his mouth. It weighed just under 700 pounds without any organs in its abdomen.

“Nice and clean,” said Fortin. “I really appreciated that.”

Lexi Krupp is a Corps member for Report for America, a nonprofit national service program that brings journalists to local newsrooms to cover underreported topics and regions.