Rangers hike to retrieve tagged moose corpse

ADIRONDACK PARK, N.Y. (NEWS10) - Some animals in the Adirondacks are fitted with GPS collars, for conservation and tracking purposes. When a tagged animal dies, its body is extracted so that Department of Environmental Conservation officials can understand what happened to it - for the better protection of the moose population at large.

Earlier this month, one such extraction took place. On April 6, a collar placed on a moose in 2022 gave off a signal indicating that the animal had died. DEC wildlife employees and state forest rangers embarked into a deeply-forested part of the Adirondacks to find the moose.

The expedition to find the moose took place while there was still a large amount of snow on the mountains in the Adirondacks. The teams were able to get within 500 yards of the signal by snowmobile and UTV travel. From there, it was a trek through as much as three feet of snow. The deceased moose was eventually found and loaded on a sled to be pulled back to the snowmobiles. The moose's body was taken to the DEC wildlife pathology laboratory in Delmar to undergo a necropsy.

In New York, moose are classified as a protected species. Threats to moose populations in the wild include black bears and coyotes, both of which prey on calves; and parasites, such as liver flukes and lungworms, which weaken even fully-grown moose and make them vulnerable to additional infections. In areas near roads, car accidents cause a significant number of moose deaths. The DEC estimated between 600 and 700 moose living in the Adirondacks as of 2018.