RE: Got my moose!
EKM,
We learned a long time ago that moose don't really hang around water much during hunting season, more so in summer. We hunt the edges of clear cuts and log overs. The newer the better. This year I found one that still had logging equipment at one end so they had just finished cutting it. It was also cut in winter which means the road in was really rough so that kept the competition away. Basically the moose feed on the edges of these cutovers and bed down in the standing timber left along water ways and swamps. By law the loggers must leave 200 ft of edge cover for any body of water but many times the timber is not of commercial value and they leave much more. This strip is called "reserve" in logging industry lingo. So I come into the cutover before daylight and set up on a piece of high ground where I have a good view of lots of ground. By 7.00 am there were no moose using the cut so I called and imediately got a response. My bull hung up on me a couple of times so I actually had to call 3 times to get him into the open or a shot. I just use my hands, no birch bark horns as I feel they are just too loud and can spook them. As for getting them out we always quarter them where they drop as they are just too big to handle. We skin them when we get back to camp. To put it in perspective, I killed at around 7.30 am and we had the moose loaded in a 4x4 around 12.00 noon with 4 guys working. If you can get an ATV right to it its alot easier but this time it was particularly nasty and our bike was left in camp that morning. As for the cover, as already stated it is in a logging area so you do have muskeg and swamp but also lots of standing timber. A mixture if spruce, pine and some hardwood. Quite flat and wet, not what I would expect elk country looks like. This year the weather was so hot we had to leave the next day as we were afraid to spoil the meat. we actually never even had to light the wood stove in the tent. We had black flies and mosquitos big time. We had a canoe, an ATV but we never ended up using them at all. We find moose tend to be in the higher country on hard ground after the summer ends. We only had 1 bull tag for 4 hunters so we only had calf tags left so we packed her in early.
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