Moose are wonderful creatures. The largest of the hoofed animals, they're in the same family as White-tailed Deers, Mule Deers, and Elk. Moose can easily tip the scales over 1,000 lbs. Imposing as they are, most of the time they are quite shy and difficult to find. In fact, two years of hiking and photographing wildlife in Jasper NP only yield few, long distance photos of fully mature bulls have made it into my portfolio. Cows and their young are more common but even they are hard to find. Standing at seven feet at the shoulder allows moose incredible ability walk over obstacles that we would have great difficulty. Very impressive animals.

As a rule, you never want to place yourself between a rutting bull and the object of his desire. Though moose are less aggressive than Elk, they can be notoriously unpredictable and physical harm is an obvious threat. Despite all this great knowledge, I still broke all the rules when taking this bull's picture.

I had seen this bull and his cow along the road leading to Maligne lake. The light wasn't nearly good enough to take acceptable photos and when I approached, the cow took to the woods closely followed by the bull. Through the woods I could see them feed along the shore of the Medicine river that ran along the road. Taking a chance, I took the woods myself a couple hundred yards down river. My hope was the moose would slowly make their way down river and I'd get an opportunity to take a couple of pictures. I planned to get away before they approached too closely and avoid breaking any rules. At least that was what I wanted to do.

I broke through the woods as planned and observed the moose up river. Well outside of shooting range, I stood and waited for the moose to get closer. Eventually, I could hear through the woods a commotion from cars stopping and tourists scrambling about. Another moose (two year old bull) was moving around the road and slowly making his way towards me at the river. This blocked my access to the road and allowed my only reasonable escape path down river. Not what I wanted. But, I still had a way out and things weren't too desperate.

Eventually I lost site of my cow and bull when they walked back into the woods. I waited 15 minutes before the cow burst out of the woods 50 feet down river and started to feed. This was not good. She blocked my only reasonable escape and I was at a total loss as to what to do next. Not a minute later, the bull broke out of the woods only 30 feet away Upriver! He stood there watching me, watching his cow, and assessing the situation. Without doing anything really stupid like moving myself too close, I had successfully broken the most important rule when in moose rutting territory. I was now between a rutting moose and his cow!

Call me a big baby but I don't have a single picture of that moose that close. I wasn't too sure about pointing my camera at him and risk an antagonized response. As if things weren't bad enough, the bull was slowly moving towards me. He was feeding and I believe he wasn't too impressed with me being around. The problem was I would've been more than happy to get out of his way but I didn't have anyway to go. The only escape I had was through the waist deep river that ran with freezing water.

Well, that's the route I took--across the river to a small island freezing all the way.

The tense situation finally simmered down and I got to taking images of this magnificent beast. This image was one of the better ones. The most difficult problem I had after taking my little walk in the river was steadying my hands enough to take photos. That water was cold!!

The lesson I learned from this whole experience is wildlife is never predictable and you can never have enough escape routes. And, your worse case scenario will happen. Maybe not today, but it will happen sometime.

Cheers

Tom