A sign on the Trans-Canada Highway in Newfoundland displays the number of collisions between vehicles and moose on this stretch of road in a national park, in April. The figure has since risen to 13.

A Menace to Motorists, but the ‘Noble’ Moose Is Adopted by Newfoundland

by · NY Times

Running into a moose when driving a car or truck is bad enough, but crashing into the giant animal while riding on two wheels can be worse.

Kevin Connors barely survived such an encounter while cruising on his motorbike just after sundown on a highway in Newfoundland, a Tennessee-size island in the North Atlantic.

“I was looking ahead of me into a gradual turn to the right, and the moose came up from the left, so I didn’t really see it until it was very close,” Mr. Connors recalled. The moose stopped in its tracks, “and I hit him dead on.”

Mr. Connors doesn’t clearly remember what happened next, but a friend traveling behind him “saw me and the moose tumbling down the road like in a cartoon.”

The moose ran off. The motorbike shot off into the woods. And Mr. Connors said he was a “living bruise” for two weeks, with a broken wrists and most of the skin scraped off his back. Five years later, he is still receiving therapy for back pain.

Kevin Connors survived hitting a moose on his motorcycle in 2019.

Rather than a rarity, such motorist-moose accidents are a common occurrence in Newfoundland, their frequency reinforced by a large sign on a portion of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs past the forests, bogs and ponds of the island’s Terra Nova National Park.

Under a drawing of a moose in a yellow warning triangle, the 7-by-12-foot sign displays the number of collisions between vehicles and moose, which can weigh half a ton or more and can do severe, even deadly, damage to anything that strikes them.

So far this year, there have been 13 such impacts on the highway, including one that killed a driver (the moose themselves rarely survive). But the island is just now entering a peak season for collisions, so that number is likely to rise. Last year, the rolling hills of the park recorded a total of 24 moose collisions.

That a moose-motorist accident happens, on average, every other week on one 27-mile stretch of highway is but one of the contemporary costs of a fateful decision made 120 years ago. That was when Newfoundland, which had no native moose, imported calves from New Brunswick to lure big game hunters as tourists, with only four surviving the ship ride.

The descendants of that quartet of calves now number 120,000 to 150,000, about one-fourth the size of Newfoundland’s human population.

“They’re an amazing animal,” said Shawn J. Leroux, a professor of biology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. “If you have good food resources, females will have twins more often. So it doesn’t take long for a population to grow if you don’t have natural predators.”

Wolves, the only true predator of moose, were essentially eliminated from the island about 90 years ago.

Across all roads on the island, part of the province of Labrador and Newfoundland, moose are involved in an annual average of 539 collisions with cars and trucks — although many Newfoundlanders believe the daily rate of 1.5 accidents is an understatement because of unreported incidents.

The collisions lead to hundreds of cases of serious injuries and several human deaths annually. In one bid to reduce accidents, rush hour radio programs include moose sightings during traffic reports.

“I’m not sure there’s anybody in the province who hasn’t had a close call,” said Andrew Furey, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. “It’s always a concern for everybody.”

The destruction wrought by the introduction of moose goes beyond the road.

Voracious eaters, moose put away about 50 pounds of food a day, and as they feast, they stunt tree growth and ravage vegetation, trampling what they don’t consume and turning forests into meadows.

Terra Nova park officials estimate that moose have significantly degraded about 70 square miles of its forest.

But despite the highway menace and the forest devastation, Newfoundlanders have adopted the “noble animal,” as it was called on its introduction, as a symbol of their rocky island, celebrating it in song and sculpture.

And a variation of the original motivation for introducing the moose remains: The annual moose hunt, which mostly involves locals, not gun-toting tourists, is a cultural event on the island.

Several factors make moose particularly dangerous for drivers and their passengers.

Despite their imposing dimensions, they can be difficult to spot. At night, moose eyes don’t glow brightly when struck by headlights, and their fur is dark.

Then there’s their center of gravity. In order to get around bogs and marshes, the bulky torsos and antler-equipped heads of moose sit atop long, spindly legs, and their top-heavy bodies are a disaster for cars and light trucks. After their legs are knocked out from beneath them, moose usually land on vehicles’ roofs, sometimes crushing the passengers underneath.

Amid the rows of steel racks holding vehicles at a scrapyard in St. John’s, the provincial capital, the demolished fronts, missing or destroyed windshields and collapsed roofs of the victims of moose collisions stand out.

“That’s a moose hit right there,” Paul Fry, the manager, said in front of the ruins of a late-model Nissan Rogue. “It’s like nothing else. The high legs, they get hit and then they tumble in from all the way up there. It’s sad stuff.”

And while the car-moose interactions are generally unintentional on both sides, that’s not always the case. Bull moose during mating season can be dangerous and aggressive, and passing cars are sometimes an outlet for that aggression.

“I think they’re the most dangerous animal in the forest,” said Professor Leroux, who also knows the animals as one of the province’s 27,500 moose-hunting license holders. “I do not want to see, if I’m not hunting, bull moose in the fall because they’re aggressive. They can be very aggressive, it’s quite shocking.”

Dr. Furey, the premier, continues to practice part time as an orthopedic surgeon. Through that work, he often sees the results of moose collisions on the road.

“One is too many with the fatalities,” he said. “But often not seen in the numbers are the consequences of a nonfatal motor vehicle collision with a moose and the impact that has on patients’ lives: arthritis, chronic pain, post-traumatic stress.”

Motorists have different moose strategies, the most common one being simply not driving at night or at least avoiding the time around dusk and dawn, when accidents are most common. And the front of most heavy trucks are equipped with battering-ram-style tubular steel guards.

Harold Pelle is a taxidermist in Glenwood, Newfoundland, whose creations often include moose. Before retirement, his job with the provincial government involved shooting moose seriously injured by vehicles and removing moose carcasses found along highway.

The moose bumpers on heavy trucks, he said, generally leave the vehicles unscathed after moose encounters, so their drivers, Mr. Pelley said, continue on without reporting the incident, lowering the overall crash statistics.

The province has tested several accident-reduction ideas: clearing back more trees and brush from beside the highway (except that can actually encourage moose to come out to the road to browse), fencing (a costly maintenance headache) and electronic moose detectors that trigger roadside warning lights (disappointingly unreliable).

So even motorists who take all reasonable precautions might not be able to avoid an encounter. “I was doing everything right,” said Mr. Connors, the motorbike rider, “until the moose popped out in front of me.”

Professor Leroux said the only government projects that have been successful, at least at reducing the number of moose, have been giving out extra permits for hunting near highways and allowing hunting in the island’s two national parks.

That said, Professor Leroux doesn’t favor removing Newfoundland’s moose — even if it were possible.

“It’s not native, but it’s naturalized,” he said sitting next to an enormous moose skull. “It’s a huge part of the culture here.”

He would like to see wolves re-established to help balance out the population, adding that it would have to be done carefully to avoid harming the island’s already diminished caribou herds.

More than a century after their arrival, the idea of eliminating the island’s moose is unthinkable to Newfoundlanders.

“For the most part, people would not want to lose the moose for whatever reason,” said Allan Brown, whose tow truck company in Gander deals with about 20 moose collisions a year. “I suspect that they got squatters’ rights.”

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