Moose in Adirondack wetland
— — the morning a shape stands up in the bog.
Not only on a wall.
“A bull moose at the edge of a black spruce bog, somewhere north of the High Peaks. The Adirondacks lost their moose to logging by 1860; the animals walked back in across Vermont in the 1980s, on their own. About four hundred of them now, scattered across six million acres. Most people never see one. The ones who do are usually awake before the sun.
Moose in Adirondack wetland, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
The Adirondack Park covers roughly six million acres across northern New York, a patchwork of public Forest Preserve and private inholdings established by the state legislature in 1892. It is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and Grand Canyon combined. The wetland belt north of the High Peaks, including Bloomingdale Bog, Spring Pond Bog, and Massawepie Mire, is boreal in character, the southern edge of the spruce-fir country that runs to Hudson Bay. Moose hold to these bogs because the willow and aquatic vegetation suit them.
A black spruce bog is one of the quietest landscapes in the East. The sphagnum underfoot absorbs sound; the trees are short and widely spaced; the water moves slowly through peat that has been accumulating for more than ten thousand years since the last glaciation. A bull moose, seven feet at the shoulder, can stand in this kind of cover and stay invisible to a hiker fifty yards off. The sound that gives him away is usually water, a footfall in shallow standing water, or the slow drip of him lifting his head from feeding.
Moose feed at the edges of the day. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation estimates roughly four hundred animals across the Adirondacks, most of them in the northern third of the Park. The best viewing window is the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before dark, May through early October, before the rut sends the bulls deeper into the woods. The Bloomingdale Bog rail trail and the Sabattis Road wetlands are the two access points most often cited by local guides.