by John Myers
published in the Duluth News Tribune, August 19, 2009
Minnesota wildlife managers should keep deer numbers to a minimum in Northeastern Minnesota but probably can continue holding a limited moose hunting season for the near future, the state’s moose advisory committee reported Tuesday.
The 18-member committee, which for nine months has studied the state’s declining moose population, presented its findings to Minnesota Department of Natural resources officials Tuesday in Duluth.
The state’s Northwestern moose herd collapsed from thousands of animals to just a few dozen in the 1990s, and now mortality rates in Northeastern Minnesota’s moose herd have biologists worried the state may lose the big animal altogether. More moose are dying, and often for reasons not clear to biologists, than is considered safe to continue the population.
Warmer summer and winter temperatures, parasites spread by deer, disease and likely other factors have combined to thwart moose at the southern edge of their natural range, said Rolf Peterson, chairman of the advisory committee and renowned moose researcher at Michigan Technological University.
Peterson said the state’s roughly 7,500 moose are hanging on but that there are “no guarantees’’ they will be around in years to come and “no silver bullet’’ to solve their decline.
Even “the tip of the Arrowhead won’t be such a hospitable place for moose a couple decades down the road,’’ he said.
Moose don’t eat on warm summer days and are left in poorer condition to make it through winter. The trend to warmer winters allows more parasites like ticks to survive and hurt moose. Warmer winters also encourage more deer to live farther north.
Among the recommendations in the advisory committee’s 45-page report:
* Keep deer numbers in Cook, Lake and eastern St. Louis County to fewer than 10 per square mile.
* Continue to allow very limited moose hunting, but end the moose season immediately if low hunter success indicates the population has dropped to critical levels.
* Ban all deer feeding in Northeastern Minnesota.
* Preserve wetlands as sanctuaries from heat stress.
DNR officials said they will consider all options suggested in the report, hold public meetings and form a moose survival or management plan over the next 12 months.
Peterson said if moose numbers continue to decline that deer numbers should be trimmed even farther, eradicating as many deer as possible in the moose’s primary range in the Minnesota Arrowhead.
The recommendations were clear that the few bull moose shot each fall by hunters is not a factor in the downward population trend.
“The committee didn’t see a problem with the continued, very conservative harvest of bulls,’’ he said. “If moose continue to decline, it won’t be because of hunter harvest.’’
Minnesota moose by the numbers
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