Moose Turd Pie

(by Leslie)

We’ve seen very little wildlife since we’ve been here: mostly just crows, and a few enormous ravens at the transfer station (i.e., where you bring your garbage). I imagine there are lots of other critters about—bunnies and foxes and other non-migratory beasts—but they’re all either hibernating or just well hidden from us city slickers.

We’d been hearing tell about the moose, and had seen lots of photos of them in the newspaper, so we were constantly on the lookout for one on our walks and from our windows. But we saw nary a one.

Then the other day I looked out the window and saw tracks in the snow. “Those must have been made by a moose,” I said to Robin.

The tracks came up through the septic field and around to the back of the house, stopped at a scraggly patch of willow, and then returned by a slightly different path. Looking closer, I spotted a pile near the willow: definitely moose turds.

Now, Ziggy has a special relationship with moose, as her first—and favorite—toy was a moose hand puppet that she got when she was just a pup:

A year later, here’s what her beloved moose looks like:

we’ve replaced the moose with a similar dog puppet,

which we named Toto

So we decided Ziggy really needed to check out the moose trail and, more importantly, the moose turds! Robin set out shoveling a path out to the moose tracks, while I photographed the event from the back deck. Here they are starting to break trail:

And here, they’ve almost made it out to the moose tracks:

They’ve now made it to the tracks. You can see the moose turds on the left (that small brown pile):

Ziggy was quite curious as to what would be at the end of the trail, and very excited when she finally got a sniff:

What we didn’t anticipate (but should have) is that now, whenever we let her outside, Ziggy makes a bee-line for the moose turds. She scampers through the path Robin dug, and carries one of the frozen nuggets back out to the driveway where she can play with it:

Here’s a little movie of her antics:

So now we have to make sure she’s not carrying one with her when we let her back inside. But it’s a great way for her to self-exercise.

There’s a fun little end to the story. Yesterday, Robin and I and our houseguests Valerie and Trisha drove north—up the highway that goes all the way to Prudhoe Bay—to have breakfast at the Hilltop Truck Stop, famous for its pies. (No, not the kind referenced in the title of this post. I’ll be doing a separate post about the experience, later). Just before we got to the town of Fox, Valerie yelled out “Moose!” Robin quickly pulled over, and there, on the side of the road, was indeed a real live moose—our first one:

And in case you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s from a Utah Phillips song that I used to hear on the Dr. Demento radio show as a kid. The story is here.