Moose and the Big City
If you want your relatives to see a moose this summer, don't drive to Denali Park. Try Anchorage.
That's the advice of Rick Sinnott, Anchorage-area biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Sinnott estimates 200-300 moose live year-round in the Anchorage bowl area, which includes downtown. The population grows by another 600-700 moose in winter.
The urban moose concentration compares to some of the best wild areas of the state, but it wasn't always that way. According to an explorer's report in 1900, moose were hard to find in what was to become the Anchorage bowl. A few hunters managed to find moose, selling the meat to miners for 10 cents a pound. When workers building the Alaska Railroad came to the area in 1915 to 1917, a boom that led to the founding of Anchorage, they killed almost all the remaining moose. Luckily, at that time miners and railroad workers accidentally started a few wildfires. The fires, along with land cleared by homesteaders, helped convert mature spruce forests to trees more palatable to moose-young birch, willows and other shrubs.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, moose were abundant in the Anchorage area. Mild winters helped the moose along in the 1970s and the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, the moose population in the Anchorage area boomed to more than 2,400 animals. Then came the crash. In the winter of 1993-1994, one-quarter of the moose in Anchorage died as a result of heavy snowfall that forced too many moose to compete for too little food. The die-off reduced the population to a more manageable level, but the local vegetation continues to suffer.
A good example of moose-effected greenery can be seen at the Anchorage International Airport, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence in the early 1980s. Outside the fence, moose have eaten all the tasty species of trees, which have been replaced by alders. Inside the fence, willows and birch grow unhindered by munching moose.
When moose populations get too high in other areas of Alaska, game managers open less restrictive hunts. Bowhunters were allowed to harvest moose several times in Anchorage, but some hunts, such as a 1983 harvest in the Hillside area, have caused as many problems as they've solved. The boundaries of public and private property were vague, and some residents complained about hunters on their land. Calls also flooded into Fish and Game after a moose wounded by an arrow was filmed by a television crew.
Moose problems in Anchorage become more severe in the winter, when heavy snows in the Chugach Mountains funnel hundreds of animals along drainages down to the Anchorage bowl. Winter is also the time that the moose herd is thinned--not by hunters, but by commuters. "Drivers end up killing 130 to 140 moose each year," Sinnott said. The worst roads for moose hazard in the winter are the streets that lead from the Chugach State Park west to the Seward Highway, including O' Malley, Huffman, Dearmoun, and Rabbit Creek roads. Sinnott said the most likely person to hit a moose is someone who lives on the Anchorage Hillside and commutes to town every day. "It's people driving to work in the dark," he said. "The moose just step out from the shadows and boom!"
Despite the dangers of hitting moose on the road or encountering them on hiking trails, a recent survey showed many people in Anchorage like having moose in town. Thirty-three percent of the respondents said they saw moose in their neighborhood a few times each week. Two-thirds said the damage moose inflict upon their gardens is tolerable. One-fourth of the people said they'd like to see moose more often in Anchorage, already one of the most likely areas in Alaska to encounter the largest member of the deer family.
