An incredible journey

Alice the wondering moose traveled hundreds of miles

By DENNIS APRILL,  Outdoors Columnist

I first heard of Alice the moose in May 2000. I was attending an Outdoor Writers of Canada conference in Laval, Quebec. An outdoor writer from Kingston, Ontario and I were at the same dinner table when he told of photographing and writing an article about a radio-collared moose roaming the Kingston area of southern Ontario, where moose are not common. 

He then added, "It’s one of yours, a New York moose." I told him I would do some investigating and get back to him. 

What follows is the story of Alice the wandering moose pieced together by SUNY, College of Environmental Science and Forestry Wildlife Technician Ray Masters in Newcomb. 

Alice, as she came to be known, was a 700 pound cow moose first sighted in Oswego and Wayne Counties in June 1998. When she moved to Webster near Rochester, the Department of Environmental Science decided to relocate her. 

She was tranquilized and fitted with a radio-collar and in July 1998 taken to the Huntington Forest near Newcomb where she was released. 

Alice remained at Huntington throughout the winter of 1998-99 and was seen with a young bull, yet no calves were found the following spring. 

In April 1999, Alice was observed swimming across the north end of Long Lake, the beginning of an odyssey that would take her many hundreds of miles over the next year. 

Through radio-tracking, it was found that Alice was heading northwest where she passed by Sabattis, Cranberry Lake,  Fort Drum, only to finally winter on a peninsula near Alexandra Bay on the St. Lawrence River, where she stayed until Spring 2000. 

That spring, Alice was off again, and was seen by an angler near Weedsport,  Ontario. She continued north past Kingston, where that writer mentioned earlier saw her, towards the Renfrew Region, northwest of Ottawa. Then Alice vanished. 

In the summer of 2001, curious as to what happened to Alice, Ray Masters phoned Mike Wilton, a former Algonquin Provincial Park Wildlife Biologist who now leads a private organization -Algonquin Ecowatch. On August 29, 2001,  Wilton, while flying over Algonquin Park, got Alice’s signal, but it was in the mortality mode. Her scattered remains were later found near Brigham Lake on the east side of Algonquin Park. Wilton judged, by the condition of the bones, Alice died sometime in the winter, but there were no clues as to what led to her demise. 

There are wolves in Algonquin, but they are the small eastern Canadian red wolf variety incapable of taking down a healthy moose. Hunting for both bull and cow moose is allowed in certain zones outside the park; however, judging from the description of the bones, it is unlikely a hunter would shoot a moose and leave large portions of meat there,  and she did perish inside the park. 

Some moose in Algonquin are infected with winter ticks, which irritate their skin, causing the big animals to rub constantly on trees. In time, big chunks of fur are lost, weakening the moose. As to whether Alice was in Algonquin long enough to get winter ticks is debatable. 

So, we will probably never know what happened to her. 

"Her age was estimated by tooth wear at three to four years," Masters says. He adds, "The straight line distance from Huntington Forest to her remains is 220 miles, the actual travel distance a lot more; I’m not sure if this is a record. 

One bull moose that was translocated from Algonquin Park to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula traveled 163 miles from the release site. It is more usual for bull moose to travel long distances than cows." Along the trek, Alice had to swim the St. Lawrence River and cross Highway 401, one of Canada’s busiest interstates where 80 MPH traffic is not uncommon. 

Whatever prompted Alice’s incredible journey will remain a mystery of nature.