It’s the kind of story as Canadian as maple syrup – a northern Ontario man found a two-day-old baby moose on the side of the highway, picked it up and took it to Tim Hortons.

"She still had the umbilical cord and was still wet when I found her," Stephan Michel Desgroseillers of Copper Cliff, Ont., told Shirley Erkila, who posted a video of her petting the calf outside the coffee shop near Sudbury, Ont., on Monday.

"The wolves would have got to her," Desgroseillers said.

In a posting on the radio station Q92 Rocks Facebook page, Desgroseillers said he was the one who picked up the small calf and took it to the Wild at Heart Animal Shelter in Lively, Ont., but not before having to keep it for the night.

On his own Facebook page, he said the moose calf was "the sweetest thing ever except for the crying."

The male calf is now being cared for by staff at the shelter, where a trio of nursemaids are taking turns tending to their new resident.

They have named it Oliver.

"Only three people can be with him right now because he needs to bond," said Adeline Charpin, an intern at the wildlife rehabilitation facility in Lively. "We’re doing all we can."

That includes sleeping with the animal, who was just two days old when he arrived at the centre on Monday and requires round-the-clock attention.

"We need to stay with him and feed him every two hours," said Charpin, one of the surrogates. "If nobody’s with him, he just cries."

Desgroseillers said friends Sylvain and Michelle Morrissette first noticed the newborn while quadding on Sunday afternoon near Dowling, Ont.

"They saw this little moose climbing out of the ditch and into traffic on Highway 144," he said. "He was still wet from being born and still had his umbilical cord."

Desgroseillers and his friends made several attempts to guide the orphan back into the woods so it could be retrieved by his mother, but each time "he would come back out and try to climb on the highway again."

Erkila said it was a thrill to meet the animal outside the Tim Hortons.

"What more Canadian experience can you have?" she said.