The moose hunting season this October coincided with a heat wave, when temperatures in the Northeast Kingdom hit the 60s and 70s for almost a week, with no rain.
“You really couldn’t make worse moose hunting conditions,” said Nick Fortin, the state’s head moose and deer biologist.
Moose aren’t active during the day when it’s hot. “They’re basically hunkered down somewhere trying to stay cool, because they have their full winter coat on already,” Fortin said. “They’re just not moving.”
And dry conditions with freshly fallen leaves mean that hunters can’t move through the woods quietly, without being noticed.
Fortin thinks the warm, dry weather was a big reason this year’s moose hunt had a lower success rate than in years past — with 62 moose taken, out of 180 permits granted by the state.
Despite that, he’s hopeful the state's moose population is slightly healthier than in recent decades, as winter ticks and brain parasites have driven declining birth rates and calf mortality. That's based on the body weights and reproductive rates he’s seen from harvested moose over the past few years.
“We’re trending in the right direction,” he said.
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Biologists can estimate the birth rate of a population by looking at scars on the ovaries of moose, from where they released an egg.
For the past three years, the average birth rate of harvested female moose has been slightly above 1, which hadn’t been the case since the early 2000s.
And harvested moose have weighed more, on average, over the past few years.
Fortin still wouldn't consider the moose population in Vermont "super healthy," he said.
“But the sky is not falling, like we were concerned about five years ago.”
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