How to Track a Moose

Video Transcript

Hi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We are going to talk briefly about moose tracks. If you would like more information, you can check our website at www.walnuthilltracking.com. Moose are actually a huge animal. Mature bulls that easily weigh 800 or 900 pounds or even a 1,000 pounds and cows usually weigh 500 to 600 pounds when mature. Their tracks are similar to white tail deer track. They are actually in the same family; the deer family. They are generally larger. They have 2 toes on either side and there is a central ridge down the middle. You would have a hard time mistaking a moose track for any other animal. Although a moose trail the pattern that it makes on the ground occasionally could throw you off depending on the substraight. Say you had soft sand or really light fluffy snow or some other conditions where the tracks did not hold that well in the substraight. Two things you can use to figure out if it’s a moose or a deer or perhaps something else like a bear would be the strides and in moose, the strides generally start at about 30 inches and can go up to 54 inches. But occasionally they will take shorter strides. The trail width generally is very wide starting at about 8 ½ inches going up to 13 to 14 inches wide so generally the trail is going to be much wider than a deer. Say you had a very small immature moose or a very large mature deer; you could conceivably confuse the individual tracks. The trail width and the stride should help you distinguish between the two. Now what often happens with a moose is that a moose is much more sloppy in its trail pattern so instead of a perfect direct register like you have with a deer, it tends to be either off to one side or another or slightly to the back or to the front. That is not as true with deer. A bear takes much shorter steps. A bear’s steps area really only about 18 to 28 inches long where as again a moose is from 30 to 54; much much longer strides.

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