Sunday, July 30, 2000
Meander north for moose
Copyright © 2001 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Maine is known for its moose. So how come you never see one?
You can sometimes find their 6-inch-long hoofprints 40 minutes north of Portland. You can find where moose have browsed on twigs or scraped bark from small trees. You can find where they dropped their droppings in a dinner-plate-sized aggregation of pecan-sized and pecan-shaped pellets. If you spend a lot of time in the woods in high black-fly season, and are lucky, you'll find their signs -- and you might even see one.
But this doesn't mean that moose are easy to see right near Portland.
There are two centers of moose abundance where they are most easily seen: the Katahdin area and the Greenville area. A summer quest to either area will most likely result in a moose sighting.
Baxter State Park, surrounding Mount Katahdin, is a favorite area for moose-watching. In midsummer, moose are almost always feeding in Sandy Stream Pond, a muddy and rocky walk from the Roaring Brook Campground. In summer, moose are often seen in ponds, because they obtain needed minerals from aquatic plants, and in so doing they can also escape the black flies.
To get to the trail head to Sandy Stream Pond, you must drive to the Roaring Brook Campground, which fills up early on a summer weekend. Fortunately, five parking places at Roaring Brook are reserved for those with a two-hour permit. You might have to wait for previous permit-holders to return, but there are pleasant, scenic, easy walks to take in the meantime: Cranberry Pond trail, Kettle Pond trail and Round Pond. (You can get a parking permit at the park entrance.)
Instead of going to Sandy Stream Pond, which is often crowded with moose-viewers, you can drive up the west side of Baxter Park, stopping to check each pond or lake as you go along. Your chances of seeing a moose are excellent.
Your chances of seeing moose tracks and pellets are 100 percent. You will feel that you are hot on the trail, with a moose just around each bend. It's important to scan the border of woods and ponds carefully, preferably with binoculars. Despite their large size, dark-colored moose can hide quite easily by standing still just inside the dark woods.
Jean Hoekwater, Baxter Park naturalist, advises that a canoe trip in a much less-used and uncrowded part of the park, Trout Brook Farm campground, is a wonderful way to experience Baxter and often results in sightings of several moose. Canoes are rented for $1 an hour; paddle downstream Matagamon Lake and back upstream. The current is pleasantly slow, and one often sees moose feeding at the edge of the stream.
Besides Katahdin, another Maine center of moose abundance is Greenville. The Chamber of Commerce has a large map on which enthusiastic moose-watchers put pins to mark the location of their sightings. A glance at the map shows you where moose are currently being seen. Lazy Tom Bog, a mile north of Kokadjo, is a popular spot. So is Route 16 and 6, popularly called "Moose Alley." It is lined with brushy areas -- actually clear-cuts that are growing back into areas rich in moose browse. Moose love browsing in regenerated clear-cuts.
Moose-watching is a summer and foliage season pastime that has become important to tourism in the Greenville area. The Birches (534-7305) offer moose safaris by boat on Moosehead Lake. North Woods Outfitters (695-3288) offer moose safaris by van.
Bob Croce and Jill Martel, owners of Spencer Pond Camps (843-5456), prefer to let nature-lovers discover moose on their own, on foot. Their rustic lakeside camps are in the center of a network of moose trails. The owners can advise you on the best places to see a moose -- sometimes a cow with calf, sometimes a yearling, sometimes a bull with antlers. Nearly all who stay at their camps are successful at finding and photographing their own moose in a wild and tranquil setting away from roads and crowds.
The "Golden Road" connects the Baxter Park area and the Greenville area. It is a rough, gravel road from which moose are often seen. Jean Hoekwater of Baxter Park advises that this road is a private road built for big logging trucks. They have the right of way and drive right down the middle of the road. They are not deliberately doing it to "play chicken" with you; they have to drive in the middle because their trucks are heavy and cannot drive on the edges of this crowned road. Many tourists. recreationists, and moose-watchers also drive on the Golden Road road and don't fully understand this. You must yield the right of way to the logging trucks.
If you understand and go along with the rules on this private road, it can be a good area to see moose.
Another drive you can take with a high probability of seeing a moose is to drive Route 26 from Bethel to Erroll, N.H. Drive slowly and check all waterways visible from the road. Waterfalls in Grafton Notch State Park are spectacular, too.
Judy Kellogg Markowsky is the director of Maine Audubon Society's Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden. This article first appeared in the Vacationland Guide.