On today's Outdoor Nevada the Nevada Department of Wildlife heads out into the Northern Nevada wilderness to track and survey a newish species to the state, moose.

We'll see the Nevada Department of Wildlife at work and learn more about this growing population of large mammals.

This is an episode you don't want to miss.

♪♪♪ -I'm Connor Fields, and this is Outdoor Nevada.

♪♪♪ Moose have been spotted in Nevada.

Moose are large members of the deer family and are known for their distinctive antlers and their large size, and now a small population of these large mammals is gradually growing in Northern Nevada.

Not long ago, we spotted one just outside of Jarbidge.

It was surprising and amazing, but we had a lot of questions.

And that's why we're here at the Elko division of the Nevada Department of Wildlife.

It's time to learn more about our newish residents from those who know best.

I was so curious why moose have been moving into Nevada.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Kari.

She is one of the first people to track and study moose here in Nevada.

Even though she is retired now, we are honored to have her be a part of this adventure.

And is the moose population in this part of the country--Idaho, Utah, Nevada--is it growing, in general, which is causing them to move down here, or is the moose population kind of standard as set and they're just moving.

(Kari Huebner) I think that the moose population was doing well, yeah.

And then what I think is happening, obviously, they're coming into brand new habitats with no competition of anything, right, because there's no other moose in a lot of the country that they're moving into in Nevada.

But then the-- we don't have-- so the top two predators of moose and moose calves are bears and wolves.

And so far, we don't have any known populations established up in this northeastern part of Nevada, so the top predators that they normally contend with aren't an issue for us yet, or we just don't have it.

The only thing I can think of that would potentially prey on a moose calf would be a mountain lion, and we have those, and they're around and could potentially be an issue.

We have not monitored any kind of predation event with the moose that we've been following, but it doesn't mean that it couldn't happen.

So I think my point being is a lot of populations get limited by predation, by habitat, by competition with other animals.

So far, I think our moose are living a pretty good life.

Yeah, it's pretty easy living for them, so far, if they can stand the heat.

-So the Outdoor Nevada crew is gonna go with you to try to find a moose.

What should they expect?

-Oh, boy.

It's, it's gonna be harder than you think.

The thought is, you know, moose are these, the largest game species we have in Nevada.

They're black, they're big.

You're like, Oh, I'll see one.

No problem.

-Bulls have antlers.

-Bulls have big antlers, yeah.

It seems like it should be easy, but I got humbled so many times where we'd have a moose with a collar on it that morning.

You look, and, you know, she's in this aspen stand or this group of willows.

And you go in, and it's like, you'll be doggoned if you can't pick them out.

You're looking with binoculars, and you're-- they tuck in so tight.

You're amazed.

I think a lot of people don't realize how tall vegetation is.

You know what I mean?

A lot of the willows and stuff are 10-, 12-feet tall, and you've got a moose that, you know, standing 8 feet in there, or whatever, and it can hide pretty well.

If they don't want you to see them, especially, they'll really tuck in tight.

But it seems like you'll look and look and look, but then, but then, when they walk out, they're so obvious, right, because the only other thing they look like a lot of times people, it's, it's hard these days, because, you know, the black Angus cows, but there's nothing like those legs on those moose.

And so it's obvious right away that you're looking at a moose and not a black cow.

-Sounds like they're hide-and-seek champions, and you're only going to see them if they want you to see them.

-Exactly, yeah.

And just like most wildlife, first thing in the morning, late in the evening.

It's hot, they don't want to be wandering around for no reason.

They find their little-- my thought is they've got these little micro habitats where they're, they've got everything they need, right?

They've got their food, their water, their shelter, and they don't, you know, if they don't have predation bothering them, they just are as happy as can be until they're bothered.

So we try not to bother them, but sometimes we want to go and take a peek, see if they have a calf with them so we can monitor the populations.

Then we leave them alone and get them back to doing whatever they were doing.

-Well, I hope you find what you're looking for and that the Outdoor Nevada crew gets to see a moose.

I love your passion.

I can't thank you enough for sharing with us.

-Oh, it's a true pleasure.

I've been retired, but you can't keep me away from these Nevada moose.

I spend time with them even when I'm just volunteering and having fun.

-The other members of the team are Cody and Travis.

They walked me through how the moose are tracked.

I see here you have a collar.

Is this a collar you have on a few of the moose?

(Travis Allen) Yep, absolutely.

So this is a bull moose collar, and this is the bottom with the battery in it, and then the top has got the GPS antenna in it.

And so this tubing on the outside actually allows this collar to stretch as the neck of the bull moose grows during the rut, and just allows a little bit of room so it doesn't constrain in on that animal.

And so this thing's collecting GPS points.

It's sending them up to the satellite, then we can check them remotely here on our computers, which is a little bit of what we'll be doing this week.

And then it's also emitting a radio signal that we can track using, like a radio antenna and telemetry for more fine-scale locations.

-Is this the southern most point of moose population in North America?

(Cody McKee) So Nevada is not the southern most point.

That's actually over in Colorado, so that's the most southern latitude that moose exist.

But we are home to the southern most subspecies of moose, which is the Shiras moose.

So North America, we have four different subspecies, Alaskan, believe the Manitoban or Canadian, and then the Eastern moose, and then Shiras.

Here in Nevada, it is the smallest subspecies.

And interestingly, as you travel south from Alaska, the subspecies get smaller and smaller, which is actually interesting, because it kind of follows this hypothesis that as mammals get closer to the equator, they tend to get smaller in body size.

-Really appreciate all the information, and best of luck.

-Thanks, Connor.

-Day one started with a plan based on the GPS coordinates of a collared moose, possibly with a calf.

The team headed north to an undisclosed location.

Camp was set, and it was time to begin the survey.

At the location, the goal was to focus on a specific area, utilizing the radio telemetry.

A signal would ping the radio.

The closer to the collared moose, the more the radio would ping.

When we arrived at the destination, all eyes were on a string of aspen.

The hope was the moose cow would have moved out into the open with the drop in temperature.

No such luck.

Nothing is easy here.

This location is truly in the middle of nowhere.

The roads are rough.

The sun was setting quick.

It was a race.

It was almost dusk, prime feeding time for moose.

♪♪♪ -Yeah, so Travis has his telemetry gear out right now, and we're trying to find one of our collared moose that's supposed to be in the area.

At least-- was it this morning that was the most recent point?

-Yeah.

-Right now, we're having a hard time picking up the signal that's coming from a radio collar, so we're gonna spend a little bit more time trying to search.

-Yeah, and the signal will disappear if she had dropped off any of these little canyons.

And so it doesn't take a whole lot for this device not to be able to hear, so we'll just pick through this and try to find some of the aspects we can't pick up from right here until we get some signal.

-The radio telemetry was silent.

All eyes scanning the canyons and tree lines.

Today wasn't the day.

It became obvious that this was not an ordinary Outdoor Nevada.

This was different.

The boundaries of trails and parks were gone.

This was a true backcountry adventure.

It was a long day and a shorter night.

It was back on the road at 4 a.m. Day 2 was remote and not ideal for the trucks, so it was a hike in.

It was packs on, radio telemetry rigs readied, and then off into the wilderness.

So it's a couple minutes before five in the morning.

We're in the north Independence.

We got a collared bull moose just over this ridge here, and we're gonna follow this road up.

Hopefully we can get a good vantage point on him and use the telemetry and try to get an observation this morning.

-Hopefully he's up and out.

It's a nice cool morning.

-Yeah.

And maybe some friends.

-You never know.

-As the group made their way in towards the most recent signal of a collared moose's location, the pings started.

A moose was close.

♪♪♪ [slow beep] -The moose was close enough now that the pace of the hike needed to be more of a creep.

It was in this stretch of dense aspen and pines where the signal was the strongest.

Now it was all about getting some eyes on the moose.

As the sun creeped over the hills, the views were amazing.

The whole area livened up.

♪♪♪ By all readings, the moose was right here.

But for as close as it was registering, you could see nothing.

It was at this point the group decided to split up.

One group would head down into the dense wooded area, and the other stay up on the ridge, keeping an eye out for the moose.

Making your way through a dense wooded area without making a sound, not easy.

We were getting closer.

Travis spotted a fresh set of tracks.

This is all about patience, but there's also the factor of the elements--the heat, the wind, the noise, us--all factors when tracking a wild animal.

-You just have to be patient.

♪♪♪ -And then... -There he is.

-He just popped over.

We saw him, and then he dropped down into the thick again.

But we've pushed him around enough for this morning.

I just saw him out of the corner of my eye.

-Yeah.

-And then I looked over, and I was like, Come on.

And you guys had just seen him.

And then I looked back and he was gone.

-Yep.

-So that's how fast it goes.

We only got a glimpse of him before he was gone.

Well, back to the drawing board.

-It was back to camp to plan the next move.

This is not easy, not easy at all.

-So we're back at camp, still struggling a little bit to get our eye actually, get our eyes on a moose.

We knew it was going to be a challenging week.

It's really hot, but we were out last night, trying to give it best effort as the sun went down, and then early, early this morning, up on the mountain before the sun came up, thinking that the moose might be-- because they'll tuck into that, that deep vegetation, and there's only so much forage.

Sometimes there's plenty of forage there, they never need to come out.

But sometimes you'll catch them outside of it, just because that's their opportunity when it's cooler to get out of the trees for a bit.

But, but that didn't pan out this morning.

It appears that almost all the wildlife this week, with the heat, are really tucked in.

We hardly saw any deer, elk, anything, and we normally would in this country.

You'd think that-- yet, I think people think that you're just at a, it's a given.

You've got this collar location, you can hear them, whatever, that you're gonna go see a moose.

But a lot of times, your plans can be disrupted when you're in this thick vegetation that moose like to live in.

-Yeah, it's honestly a little bit like hunting.

I mean, your every step matters.

You know, you're looking at the ground for every foot placement that you're going to have maybe three or four steps out.

You're looking 10 yards in front of you to see, do I need to go left around brush or go right around that brush?

And so you're literally just picking out what you think is going to be the most quiet path towards that animal, while you're holding a telemetry device to your ear, listening for a subtle beep that's telling you, Okay, not that way.

Okay, that's warmer, hot, warm, cold.

And so you're juggling those two things, and then you're also making just really awkward steps the whole time, over that bush, under that stick.

You're just juggling this whole kind of dance with the aspen stand.

You know, it's really interesting.

We probably have driven by half a dozen moose the last day of us just beating around these hills and trying to get closer to the moose that we know exist.

But because the vegetation is thick enough and these moose are really good at finding micro climates within the vegetation, we just don't see them.

We don't know they're there.

And it's just amazing that an animal like that can vanish in the blink of an eye.

Just like the bull that we saw this morning, he was there and then he wasn't.

-With so many places for the moose to bed down and stay cool, Cody and Travis made the decision to move camp and give another location a try.

-So we decided to move up in elevation where we might get some cooler temperatures, potentially a little bit better habitat, more opportunity to see some of our collard critters that we have up top and maybe some more incidental stuff.

-Day 3, we started out, just Travis and I.

Unfortunately, Kari had to head back to town.

We got a good triangulation on where that hole might be.

We started pursuing that signal.

-This was a much different landscape.

Not only was the elevation higher, the terrain was rough.

Cody and Travis wanted to be as careful and quiet as possible.

They did not want to disturb the moose.

It was the only way to have the best possible opportunity to get eyes on it.

♪♪♪ It was slow going through the rugged terrain.

♪♪♪ GPS coordinates were checked and double checked.

They both monitored the radio telemetry.

-So we're tracking a bull moose.

Fortunately, it was right above our camp that we just moved to, but it's in this thick timber right behind us.

And just getting here, we had to bushwhack through some pretty dense vegetation.

So right now, what we're thinking is having Travis go around the top on the back side of this timber stand, and then I'm gonna go in the middle.

Hopefully, I can get to an undisturbed.

But if I do happen to push it, we think there's a good chance it's gonna go out the back side where Travis will be, and he'll at least be able to get a good look at it.

-Cody stayed in place for now.

Travis moved out of the thick of it to the lower portion of the canyon before hiking up the opposite side of where the moose was bedded down.

This hike was just about two miles around the wooded area.

Travis did this to keep clear of the swirling wind and giving away his position.

Travis settled into a location that he felt would give him the best opportunity for the widest field of view.

He radioed Cody, letting him know he was in a good position.

Cody moved back into the wooded area.

It was now a slow creep in.

Cody didn't want to spook the moose.

He just wanted to let the bull know that he was there.

And so as I waited for Travis, we had radio contact, and we were able to make sure that we were both lined up right where we wanted to be and were set up to make a move.

When Travis was set up on the hillside above the moose, looking down into this aspen stand, I started to slowly creep through the timber.

Unfortunately, within about 10, 15 feet of that trek, it became pretty apparent to me that we weren't going to get close to him.

It was too loud.

Sticks were breaking.

Everything was super dry.

And even just trying to get through the thick brush, you're scraping, scraping limbs on your backpack.

Things were breaking.

It was just too loud.

And I think in that process, as we were kind of crunching through stuff, I heard, I heard something in the distance, a big limb breaking.

Something got up.

And I think that we probably disturbed that moose.

He at least got up and knew that there was something going on and started standing around.

And at about that point, I got a radio call from Travis letting me know, Hey, man, I think we've got eyes on him.

-Knowing that Cody was in the timber, I was just glassing that whole edge of the timber from our side.

And so you're not often looking for a full body of this giant animal.

You're looking for the bits and pieces.

The bits and pieces that don't stand out are these big buckets that have all these points on top.

And so at first when I saw him, it was just the, kind of the back of his shoulders and the tips of the antlers through the, through the aspens.

And we could probably only see, I mean, a couple inches worth of, worth of his body.

But it was pretty clear that it was a moose.

It was dark black in the green aspen.

So we watched it for a second.

I was pretty sure that that was him.

And then he kind of fed around a bush and started showing a bit more of himself.

And so that was pretty exciting.

And then, yeah, once he, once he stepped out into the opening, which we were just so luckily and perfectly in place to see his body at scale is amazing that he was able to be so camouflaged behind such, you know, just basic leaves, essentially.

-And all the while, unbeknownst to me, Travis had great, a great view of this bull feeding, you know, looking around, just doing what moose do in some of the greatest moose habitat that we have here in the state.

So I'm slightly jealous that I didn't get to see him from that side, but I'm also happy that I think I at least played a small part in getting him up so that Travis was able to see him from the other side.

And you know, the great thing is, you know, we did disturb him while he was in his bed, but it seems like it was pretty minimal to get out and to locate this bull that was close to our camp.

And then to hear over the radio, Hey, we've got eyes on this animal, like that was pure elation for me, because at that point, I knew that it wasn't all for naught, that we're out here getting great information about our moose herd that we can also share with Nevadans that are probably not really aware we even have moose here in this state.

We've been out here in Northern Nevada for three days.

Our whole purpose was to get out and hopefully find some cow moose that we've been tracking with radio callers and assess whether or not they have calves at heal.

And I think on Day 1, it became pretty clear we were going to have an uphill battle.

So we kind of had to pivot.

And fortunately, our bull collars that are also in the area, our bulls that are on air, we had that updated data, so we were able to kind of focus on tracking our bulls and getting some eyes on them, assessing body condition, and just making sure that they seem to be healthy and happy.

So, you know, speaking for Travis and myself, you know, neither of us had a broad background in moose ecology and studying moose.

So anytime we're able to get out into the field and experience where they're living, the habitat types that they're utilizing, and just how they're generally behaving on the landscape, it's a great benefit to us as well as the agency, because it's really strengthening our understanding of moose and then being able to answer questions.

From my perspective, Kari is a real trailblazer when it comes to moose here in the state.

She had some of the first moose sightings.

She was probably one of the first contemporary biologists that had a moose observation in her area.

And her enthusiasm for moose was contagious, so it wore off on all of us.

-Kari set the tone for how we were going to monitor and, potentially, you know, look into the future of management for moose in the state.

And being a younger biologist in the state, I really got to learn a lot from her on a process of monitoring a new species, something that we hadn't done before, and see how she was laying the ground for what types of efforts we were going to take on to make sure that this happened every year.

And, yeah, that enthusiasm totally wore off.

And just like Cody said, we're running with everything that she started.

And now that she's retired, it's really great to just be back out here doing it again.

I got to spend the last four years doing it with her from a work perspective and thought I was going to miss out this year.

And it was fun to have her out to do that together one more time.

-I have so many questions as a biologist, just full of questions all the time, and I can't wait to find out how many moose we can support in Nevada.

I think that's the big question, right?

Because they're, they're reproducing so well, and the population is so healthy, and it's like, well, where's the limit, you know?

What's the top end?

And so I'm excited, and I know that NDOW's got a bunch of studies, plans to keep learning about how they're using our habitats and then, you know, exercises where they could see how much of that habitat is actually available to Moose and, and I'm just, I'm just really excited.

It's just, just the very beginning of a really exciting story.

-I mean, when I think about this, moose are one of our lesser known species in the state, one of our lesser understood species in the state.

A lot of Nevada citizens and in the West and the nation don't know that moose are here yet.

So for me, it's getting, you know, the light put on something that the department's really excited about, that citizens that are aware of moose are really excited about, and kind of bringing light to that species and showing the work that we're doing to monitor this species and to just really kind of highlight moose as this newcomer to the state that's been a real cool addition for us in Nevada.

-We're still learning about our moose.

They're new to the state.

And the more that we can do to understand those populations, the better biologists and managers that we can be, and also being able to help spread the word to the citizens of the state about moose and how well they're doing here.

-I gotta tell you, next time there's an adventure like this, I'm going.

It is incredible to see a large mammal species, like a moose, find its way into Nevada as a natural movement and settling.

It is incredible.

We are literally witnessing nature at work.

I hope these moose continue to thrive and become a pivotal part of Nevada's landscape.

A massive thank you to everyone at the Nevada Department of Wildlife.

Till next time, I'm Connor Fields, and this is Outdoor Nevada.

♪♪♪