Moose and goats - the big picture

If you wander around the woods enough, you begin to take a different perspective on things. You notice minute details about places, and you also take in a bigger picture, which might seem like a contradiction in terms until you actually experience it.

I suppose I wander around in the woods at least 150 days a year and closer to 200. In 2009, I wandered around Glacier National Park every day for 100 straight days, which is a good way to strain a marriage and a better way to get a handle on the natural world. Granted, those weren't 100 straight days in the backcountry - I did go home most days - but I still saw a lot of cool stuff.

For example, if there's about an inch of topsoil on a steep cliffy mountain, it's just enough dirt to hold enough moisture for plants to grow. In fact, an amazing number of plants will grow, and the plants in turn will attract mountain goats. A similar mountain on the other hand, without topsoil, just rock and steep slopes, will hold far fewer if any plants, and thus won't have goats.

Mountain goats don't really demand all that much either - they need steep slopes to avoid predators and just enough grass, bushes and forbs to munch on, and their incredible digestive systems do the rest. It's interesting to see such a harsh environment produce such a magnificent animal.

Same can be said for bighorn sheep. Although they (generally) live slightly lower on the slopes than goats, their needs are very similar. Lower in the valley are elk and mule deer and lower still are moose. It's impressive to see a 1,400-pound animal like a bull moose grow from a diet of willows, dogwood and aquatic plants.

Last summer, I watched a bull moose feed on aquatic plants growing at the bottom of Red Eagle Lake. The moose walked through camp, went about 50 yards into the water and then plunged its entire body into the water. It stayed submerged until it had a mouthful, then raised its head, shook off, blew water out of its nose and munched away.

It fed like this for a good hour. How the moose even knew the weeds were down there is beyond me. A learned behavior. How many pounds of weeds it ate I can only guess - with every plunge, it looked like he had a good 5-gallon bucket-full in his mouth.

These creatures all end up large and vibrant without any help from us. In fact, they'd just as soon be left alone - never needed humans and never will.

Yet here we are, most of us ranging between 125 and 200 pounds as adults, and look at the resources we extract in just a single day - gallons of gasoline, kilowatts of electricity, pounds of processed food. And somehow there are 6.9 billion of us and a United Nations report predicts that population could rise to 8.9 billion by 2050.

I'm certainly not convinced this is sustainable. On the other hand, I don't think humans will go extinct, either. But if the end ever does come for the species Homo sapiens, there is still a comfort in the fact that a moose can wander out into a remote lake and make a very nice living out of it, and that a mountain goat can do just fine looking down on what's left of us from inhospitable cliffs.