BWCA Dogs and moose Boundary Waters Listening Point - General Discussion
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07/11/2020 04:24PM  
This seems to be a current topic. My current and best boy ever was on his second bwca trip. Nine months old at the time. My daughter and I got a late start and we were hiking the Sioux-hustler trail in the with headlamps. It was a cold November night with light rain. We were about three miles in and in a wet section of trail in a spruce swamp. To our left was higher ground. My puppy stops, he was in the lead and always is close to us. He lets out a very quite bark, a buff actually and points to our right. He’s a Labrador, sometimes he points. With our headlamps and the rain it sadopooppli difficult to see. We make out what appears to be two boulders but as our eyes adjusted we see that it is two cow moose. Maybe twenty feet off the trail. This was concerning. My dog turns and now barks, we can just make out the bull. I’ve lived in Alaska and hiked with grizzlies, this was a different level of scary. Nothing happened, we
Picked up our pace though.

I had a husky when I was dumber. ‘Whose a good boy?’ Would not apply to this monster (actually I loved him, he was a husky doing husky stuff which means pretty much anything he wanted to do). He found a moose and thought that it would be a good time to join the forest animals. He did come back and spent the night chewing up my buddies Clement paddle



 
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07/11/2020 08:52PM  
Bears, wolves, now moose too? The squirrels and other small creatures will be a welcome distraction from those bigger threats! I like seeing wildlife in the wild, but not up close and personal!
 
07/11/2020 09:30PM  
Bernice my old Chesapeake used to love watching moose be it from canoe or campsite. She had great respect for animals bigger then her! Never barked at them... but we never had one actually in our campsite. She did chase a big buck out of a site once, but he was a little close. My favorite moose encounter was she woke me up hearing something coming up the shore... we went and watched a big bull walk right past us in the shallow water just a few feet away in the full moon light.
 
07/12/2020 08:00AM  
On an early May trip, Echo and I had a cow moose and yearling calves run through a campsite about 20 yards away from us. We were checking out empty campsites because all of them were empty as it was a few days after ice out and the only people we ended up seeing on the trip were 2 FS rangers. As we walked up into one of the sites we heard a large branch snap, crashing though the trees, and the ground was shaking as they ran by through a clearing. Echo sat down at my feet, turned and looked at me, and appeared to be saying.. "did you see that"

I got off a rushed and not so good photo of the moose running by because I already had my camera in my hand.

 
07/12/2020 05:52PM  
I took Luna when she was 2 years old on her first canoe camping trip. We went to the Falls chain in Quetico in 2013 and were headed out after 10 nights. Our last night camp was a small island on Birch Lake and it was situated very close to the western shore maybe 40-50 yards away.

The night became one of those incredibly calm, still evenings and we sat on a bluff about 10 feet over the water watching the beavers swim by and hearing the loons call across the lake.

Suddenly I heard a branch snap on the mainland. Then heard it again. Now Luna is zeroed in on the sound and staring at the forest across the water. A few more loud crunches in the trees but we see nothing. Luna gave one short bark and I remembered it echoed over the lake. That was it, we never heard the sound again. After 3 more canoe trips Luna still hasn't "seen" a moose.

I love this pic of her staring like a statue at the sound across the channel.


 
07/13/2020 07:32PM  
Fun stories! My dog hated the BWCA, and I hated having him there, so hopefully he will never encounter a moose. He didn't like meeting a horse, so I'm sure he would be even less friendly to a moose. Now, he did meet a baby bird last week, and was adorable trying to figure out what it was and looking to me for direction... but that's another story. Baby bird is fine now.

My Alaskan sisters keep the dogs in when there are moose about - no one wants to see that!
 
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