Moose visit

We recently had some unexpected visitors: 3 moose! A cow moose and her twin yearlings came to see us… well, they mostly came to nibble on our trees and shrubs but they also let us get some pretty good looks at them, while keeping to a safe distance, of course.

Bill and I have been noticing that we don’t see deer and moose as much as we used to. While that’s a good thing when it comes to having a garden, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy watching them.

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of development going on in our locale so that is pushing wild critters out of their natural environment and that’s sad.

During our moose visit, I was able to take a bit of video of them and quite a few photos. Here’s the video:

The mama moose and yearling #1, as I called him/her, stayed in the front yard and even bedded down for a while in the middle of our newest native shrub plantings. But yearling #2 (see photo below) decided to leap the side fence — as you just saw in the video — and I was stunned by how easily he cleared the fence. They always seem so big and lumbering to me.

Fortunately, we have a deer fence around our orchard and our immediate backyard where we grow our veggies, berries and oodles of flowers. So that area was safe.

Anyway, yearling #2 decided to make himself at home, munching on fir tree branches and aspen saplings, among other things. Oh, and that shrub he’s nibbling on at the start of the video is a yew. Boy, do moose love yews! I don’t mind if they get a bit of pruning, but moose never seem to care about how they look afterwards. Oh well.