No more free lunch for moose

POINT MacKENZIE — That there’s no free lunch apparently applies to wildlife as well as the business world. That’s the message a large number of hungry moose are getting this winter at Wayne Brost’s Point MacKenzie-area farm.

“Last winter was terrible,” Brost said about the feed he lost to starving moose. “We probably lost $5,000 to $8,000 worth of feed. It was terrible. I make silage and put it in big, white plastic tube lines and that’s how I store it. They broke into it terrible bad.”

Moose finding the feed Brost grows and stores over the winter as easy pickings isn’t a new problem, but one that was exacerbated during last year’s record snowfall that drove starving moose into populated areas.

“We figure we usually donate $2,000 to $3,000 a year to the moose, because they really like this feed,” he said. “But, it costs us a small fortune to fence it all, so we figure we’ll lose a couple thousand dollars a year, and we can absorb that. But last year was ridiculous.”

One of the main problems that cropped up last winter was moose getting into his feed storage as well as the plastic tubes that are in the fields, he said. Moose ravaged his open-ended Quonset hut last year.

That’s where the Alaska Moose Federation comes in. After Brost took his case to the state Department of Fish and Game, which told Brost that keeping moose out of his feed wasn’t its problem, the longtime farmer appealed to AMF.

Although keeping moose out of farmers’ feed isn’t the specific mission of the moose federation, mitigating moose-human contact is, said AMF Executive Director Gary Olson. But building traditional fencing is expensive and labor-intensive, especially around large tracts of land.

Instead of spending its financial resources on fencing, AMF used some old donated well pipe and gathered volunteers to build panels to place around the open ends of Brost’s storage hut.

“It’s just old well pipe that gets pulled out of the ground, and we take that old well pipe and cut it into specific sizes,” Olson said. “Sampson Steel in Anchorage lets us go in and use their shop on the weekends. Then our volunteers weld them all together. It’s all recycled, otherwise it goes to scrap.”

When he heard about Brost’s problem, Olson said he knew there was something AMF could offer to the agriculture community. In the Valley alone, he said Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss has told AMF that there could be another eight to 10 area farms that could use panels to help mitigate losses to Moose.

“Mr. Brost had 80 moose on his farm last year every day, and we were working on a diversionary feeding program and trying to get moose away from roadways and away from farm areas and back into the woods,” Olson said. “We decided to help this farmer out as just another thing we can do to relieve conflict between moose and people.”

One of the problems farmers have is that moose remember where they can pick up a free meal and will show those areas to their calves, Olson said.

“Those moose have habituated to those farms for about a decade now, and there’s so many moose,” he said. “Moose were starving and were really hit hard last year, but the ones on (Brost’s) land? Those were 80 of the fattest, shiniest moose in the state, and they’re training their calves to be there.”

Because the materials for the panels are donated and the labor is volunteer, there is almost no cost to the moose federation, Olson said.

For Brost, he still expects some loss to moose, but at nowhere near the level as last winter, he said.

“It’s definitely going to help and it’s going to save me the waste from that shed last year, and that’s something,” he said. “They went in there on my square bale pile last year, but they jumped over the round bales and what they didn’t eat, they defecated on and bedded up in there.”

Contact reporter Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.