Transcripts

LEIF ENGER: This is how fish and wildlife keeps tabs on the herd these days, tooling around the dirt roads and grassy dikes of the Agassiz refuge in a stove in Chevy love, listening to signals pulled in by a monstrous antenna bolted to the roof of the truck.

DAN VAN EPPS: I don't know. I would guess we're pretty close, within a mile.

LEIF ENGER: Fish and Wildlife employee Dan van Epps is actually a fire technician but volunteers for Chevy duty several evenings a week. Each of the radio tagged moose calves has its own frequency. One beep per second means the calf is all right. Two beeps a second means it's dead. Since last spring three calves have died. An unidentified virus took one. Another was stomped by its mother. The third was surprised by a black bear.

DAN VAN EPPS: The bear's got a habit of peeling that skin back so nice. That's how they figured it was a bear that, at least, ate it. Peeled that skin back nice just like skinning a deer, I guess.

LEIF ENGER: The reason for tracking the critters so closely is the worrisome trend in the refuge's moose surveys. The moose are counted every year at Agassiz. Only three years ago, says wildlife biologist Gary Hushley, the herd was right at its historical size of about 270 animals.

GARY HUSHLEY: Two years ago, it dropped down to 170. And then this past year, it dropped down to 110. Prior to two years ago, the population hadn't been below 200 in the past 30 years.

LEIF ENGER: The research has focused on calves because they're the most vulnerable members of the herd. Hushley says, frankly, he expected more of the animals to die by now and their deaths to point to some kind of consistent culprit. Brainworm, for example, often kills moose, so do tick infestations, which can cause an animal to rub off so much hair, it actually dies of exposure. But the calves survival rate of 75% is considered high, even for a healthy herd, which leads to the question of evidence.

If the Agassiz herd is dying off, be it from bears or brainworms or baffling viruses, where are all the bodies?

GARY HUSHLEY: In the past, there have been die-offs due to these problems. And you see the dead animals much more so than what we have here the last couple of years. You find them along the roads or along the dikes. You see the sick moose or the bald ones in the spring. In the last two years, we've not seen very many.

LEIF ENGER: Hushley offers several possible explanations that might not show up in the current study. The moose could be migrating out as adults or other calves, ones without radio tags, could be falling prey to wolves or bears, both of which are increasing on the refuge. After all, Hushley says, 12 animals is a pretty small sample and the Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to muster enough funding to expand its study. But Mark Linares, an animal populations expert with the Minnesota DNR suggests there might be something simpler behind the low moose count. Maybe, he says, the Fish and Wildlife guys doing the counting just missed a lot of moose.

MARK LINARES: It could be a problem with the survey that they did, especially last year because it was done early with very poor survey conditions. There was very little snow on the ground. And so a lot of the moose may have been missed.

LEIF ENGER: Linares coordinates the moose surveys done each year across all of Northern Minnesota. He says right now, the state has about 8,000 moose, a good, robust herd. While he doesn't know specifically what's happening within the borders of the federal Agassiz Refuge, he says moose numbers in the whole Northwest region are stable to say the least.

MARK LINARES: In fact, last year, the recruitment or the number of calves per cow in the Northwest set record highs. And so if this population was in fact declining, we certainly wouldn't be seeing the record recruitment that we saw last year.

[MOOSE GRUNTING]

LEIF ENGER: On the other hand, you could go days on the refuge with not a sign of a moose, except a few electronic beeps. Just minutes ago, a report came in of a big bull on this dirt maintenance road. Dan van Epps sped right over in the bruised Chevy and set up a taped call. It's a lonesome appeal amplified over a great expanse of willow scrub and cattails and water. You could wait a long time before anything shows up.

[MOOSE GRUNTING]

From the Agassiz Refuge, this is Leif Enger, Main Street Radio.

[MOOSE GRUNTING]