The Man with a Plan to Save Maine’s Moose Population
August 14, 2025 at 07:30PMFor Down East Magazine, Jesse Ellison profiles Lee Kantar, the first moose biologist employed by the state of Maine. Using science, Kantar is working to better understand and protect Maine’s moose population from their chief threat: huge numbers of winter ticks that latch on to moose for months at a time, slowly bleeding them to death.
Kantar set out to make moose management as scientific a practice as possible, so he leaned in to data collection. A decade ago, he started spending a week every January flying over moose country in a helicopter with aerial-tracking specialists from New Zealand. The first year, the team used nets to capture a total of 60 moose (30 calves and 30 adults), looping slings around them so they could be lifted and weighed, then attaching leather collars with embedded radio transmitters. Kantar modified the collars himself, adding plastic tubing that allows them to expand as the moose grows and eventually fall off. Now, every winter, he and his crew go back out and put dropped collars on new moose — there are always about 70 collared moose roaming the Maine woods.
When I called him this spring, he answered with a heavy sigh. April is a month of death, he told me, and he’d been woken up at 3 that morning by the sound of the grim reaper — the notification tone he has set for the app that tells him that a collar hasn’t moved for six hours. Either the collar fell off or the moose is dead. It’s almost always the latter.
Kantar would have to find the body and perform a necropsy, assessing a cause of death. Winter ticks were almost certainly the culprit. Had the moose curled up and fallen asleep under a tree and never awoken? Or had it just tipped over dead? He’d get some idea of the circumstances once he got out there.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/14/maine-moose-conservation/
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