May 24 to 28: Great North Woods of Maine Train Spotting Trip 2K19

Can barely see him. Its like an extension of the tree

 

Do I? Haha I just know how to get to them

 

Oh man, that's scary!

 

The wife says I told you
I was trying to keep the bears away.

 

By what - farting?

 

No, by how he is dressed

 

thinking the bears might like the way he is dressed. I am sure Pajama material is way easier on the gut than Jeans.

 

I didn't want to share his with you till after the trip and this is why I sleep with a 45

 

A few of the better pictures I got with the drone before we hiked to the locomotives.

 

I meant to ask the group, did anyone see any moose carcasses on the roads? We saw two that were all bones. The only cause I could think of is that they were hit by the logging trucks.

 

Not this trip. Have seen a few of those up there though. Not sure about the cause - Id think a logging truck would leave a lot of damage / broken bones

 

stoked for all the cool photos and stuff! Hopefully we can make it on the next one!

 

Ticks are a major killer to moose, I bet it fell I'll and the coyotes got to it

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/climate/moose-ticks.html

47,000 Ticks on a Moose, and That’s Just Average. Blame Climate Change.

An adult moose with hair loss resulting from winter ticks.CreditDan Bergeron/New Hampshire Fish and Game Department

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An adult moose with hair loss resulting from winter ticks.CreditCreditDan Bergeron/New Hampshire Fish and Game Department

By Kendra Pierre-Louis

The biggest number of winter ticks that Peter J. Pekins ever found on a moose was about 100,000. But that moose calf was already dead, most likely the victim of anemia, which develops when that many ticks drain a moose’s blood. So it was probably a lowball estimate, because some of the ticks had already detached.

“It’s about as grody a picture as you can imagine on a dead animal,” said Dr. Pekins, a professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of New Hampshire. (A warning: The pictures below are, indeed, grody.)

Between 2014 and 2016, Dr. Pekins counted ticks on moose calves at two locations in New Hampshire and Maine. He wanted to see how the moose were faring, given that climate change has been delaying snow’s arrival in New England’s winters.

published last month in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. They argued that three consecutive years of tick outbreaks “arguably reflects a host-parasite relationship strongly influenced by climate change at the southern fringe of moose habitat.
While large numbers of ticks, literal bloodsucking parasites, aren’t great for adult moose, they’re especially bad for moose calves, which can die from the onslaught.

With the help of a team that shoots nets from helicopters to catch and tag the calves with radio collars (a process that takes about 15 minutes for the moose and eschews the use of drugs), Dr. Pekins was able to track 179 moose calves. The average number of ticks he found on them was 47,371.


This moose calf was covered with more than 50,000 ticks when it died from extreme weight loss and acute anemia.CreditHenry Jones/Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife

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This moose calf was covered with more than 50,000 ticks when it died from extreme weight loss and acute anemia.CreditHenry Jones/Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife

 

Ticks are nasty

 

I saw a lot of moose carcass late this season while snowmobiling in Northern Maine. It was a hard winter on moose but I see them every year on the trails, both alive and dead. They like to stay on the roads and groomed snowmobile trails for easy travel. Lot of people don't realize they basically starve to death every winter. That is why it's so bad for snowmobilers to push them down the trail. They may require for example 50,000 calories to stay alive through the winter. If you run them down a trail ahead of you for a mile hoping it turns off the trail into the woods, that 1 single mile may kill them a month later as they struggle to survive until snow melt. But they aren't usually killed by logging trucks or impacts, they usually drop dead in the trail.

 

Took me a month and a half, but I finally washed the layer of dirt from this trip off

 

I reupped this weekend haha. Not as bad this time. Btw found a bomb breakfast spot

 

Auntie M’s?