Kathleen Lavey

Lansing State Journal

While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service collects information to decide whether to list the northwestern moose as a threatened or endangered species, Michigan wildlife experts are working on a couple of additional questions.

Are there even any of them left in Michigan?

"We're uncertain at this time and we're continuing to investigate," said Daniel Kennedy, endangered species coordinator for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

Or were they ever here?

"That's a really good question. We really don't know the subspecies of moose that we had historically in mainland Michigan," said Dean Beyer, wildlife research specialist for the DNR based in Marqette.

Here's what we do know: Michigan's moose history is muddled.

Some type of moose -- maybe alces alces andersoni, the species being evaluated, or alces alces americana, the eastern moose, once lived over most of the state, except for the southwestern region.

But as people moved in and land was cleared, two things happened: Moose had less of the early successional forest habitat where they like to live (think younger trees and tasty clumps of brush) and people killed and ate them.

Additionally, whitetail deer, the moose's forest neighbor, harbored a nasty little worm that doesn't really harm them, but kills infected moose.

Moose had disappeared from the Lower Peninsula by the 1890s, leaving a handful of lucky beasts scattered around the Upper Peninsula.

After that?

"The history is a little confounded, because we brought moose from Isle Royale," Beyer said. "That makes it a little difficult to know what we really had here."

He's referring to an early attempt to repopulate by bringing moose from the overcrowded island in Lake Superior to the Upper Peninsula in the 1930s.

Those moose weren't healthy to begin with. Overcrowding on Isle Royale meant not enough food for anyone, and they didn't thrive on the mainland. The experiment was chalked up as a failure.

During the 1980s, the DNR brought 59 moose from Ontario to Marquette County in hopes of building a herd.

That worked, mostly. These days, Kennedy said, there are about 400 moose in that western U.P. herd descended from those Canadian moose and about 100 in the eastern Upper Peninsula.

The northwestern and eastern moose species can be differentiated by specific characteristics of the animals' skulls. Beyer said they've searched Michigan museums for historical examples of northwestern moose skulls but so far haven't found any.

The historic ranges of the species overlap, so geography isn't really a clue. And early research papers on the northwestern subspecies and Michigan's native moose simply aren't definitive.

DNR officials said they'll work with the U.S. and Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota to determine the importance of the northwestern moose and figure out whether a threatened listing is warranted.

All moose are currently listed in Michigan as a "species of special concern," but that affords them no special protection.

The 60-day comment period to solicit relevant information from the public is open through Aug. 2; you can look at the federal notice or leave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a comment here: https://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=FWS-R3-ES-2016-0061