More Than One Way to Die, part IV Orphan Moose

I realize this is not a very glamorous subject to write or read about but animals rescued from the wild are not all fairy-tale features. Those individuals having the revered interest and opportunity to take part in saving lives deserve to be told the whole story. And sadly, this is one of those chapters.

.....Baby had been grooming herself excessively. I never knew moose were such clean creatures. She is a veritable yoga guru elongating her neck to stroke bony shoulders with a thick muscled tongue that darts in and out with snake-like precision. Hind legs extend forward with flexibility of a gymnast to appease her forehead. I watched and wondered at this sprucing up ritual. Once I observed her curl velvety lips back to open passage for teeth and savagely rip out a tuft of brittle hair from her whithers. I thought this odd and jotted a note in my journal as a sign of orphan oddities. Curiosity compelled me to research this obsessive behavior. Inscesent grooming could be a comfort practice I imagined. She was without the reassurance of an adult and needed consolation
......How wrong surface impressions can be. Another barbaric act of nature had reared its hideous head. Baby was covered with reddish-gray blobs of blood-sucking ticks over one-fourth of her tiny body. We had no way of telling how many lay burrowed beneath the hide but there were an observable 30-50 exposed on patches of bare skin. Baby's concentrated grooming tactics were on-going labors to purge these blood-sucking demons from her flesh. A species called Dermacentor Albipictus or winter Ticks. *

.....Winter ticks kill. They cause blood loss, itching, inflammation and skin ulcerations. Ticks winter over in moose as well as deer and elk. Animals become infested in late summer to early autumn when they contact lumps of tick larvae on tips of vegetation.* By November ticks molt to nymphs and in January begin feeding. They peak in mid-February and molt into adults.* (Mid-February was when we first noticed the largest ones on her rump.) Numbers peak in late March through April and all drop off by mid-May.* The moose can live tick free until late summer when the cycle starts over again.* Winter ticks however are most prevalent south of 60 degrees latitude.* When winters are as horrid as the ones we have been battling, food is meager and vital protective fur drops off due to tick infestation. Malnutrition and exposure are the bold indisputable signatures found on their death certificates.

...What would be our course of action given this new information? Only what is within our power; extra food, more attention and greater love. We boosted Baby's intake of deer feed adding cracked corn. Coincidence or cure we aren't sure, but within a week we started finding dead ticks in the driveway, on the ground around her bed and on our back porch some as large as grapes. The land leeches were falling off as Baby sustained her grooming routine with vengeance. Innovation sparked new ways to rid her body of these hostile pests. She utilized the hoods of our vehicles by rubbing her chest and cheeks insatiably back and forth across the fenders and grills crushing ticks to death. I want to believe the warmth from those engines also allowed her a brief respite from the agony. All though these types of ticks do not prefer human hosts * it is a constant sanitation effort around our abode. But how reassuring to see gentle tufts of hair growing back over the ravaged skin.

.....I know without a doubt had we not intervened in the salvation of this immature moose we all would have discovered there is more than one way to die out here. I trust that with our continued efforts Baby will live to create the next generation.