The good news is that I can say that as of late this morning she was alive and her calf seemed to be doing just fine. I cannot say she was "well", though....although from what people said she had improved a lot (!!) over the last few days. She must have had one heck of a fight with whatever attacked her...and what a story that she even survived!
When we fist saw her she was lying down with her head up looking around, and the calf was alseep, barely discernable on the ground as a little mound of light brown fluff. Things got interesting when the calf got up ...
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and wanted to feed. After a minute or so, the mother got up...
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She walked, followed by the calf, down the hill a little ways and into and across a small stream. The calf seemed to try (just by copying its mother?) to eat grass or other vegetation, but we wondered if calves a week or less old can eat grass? Eventually the mother crossed the road (!) in spite of the small crowd and the cars. She returned half way across the road when the calf was a bit afraid, but eventually calf and mother walked slowly up the hill, roughly northwestward. The problem....northwestward was back toward Roosevelt and the whole Druids, which were quite active this morning having killed an elk late yesterday. We, those of us standing watching the moose, did not want her to go up toward the wolves.
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Maybe she understood, or maybe she smelled or sensed danger, because before she got to the top of the ridge, she stopped and turned around and came back down the hill at a bit faster clip than she had done on the way up! The calf follwed her back down across the road, and they had a nice get-together moment...
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A little while later, they ended up just about where they had started, lying down just in front of a downed log about 150 feet from the road...
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After that we had a first: we started our own jam!!! We were the first to see a hawk on the ground not far from the road chowing down on something uinknown...
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The hawk ended up in a narby aspen (?) tree and cleaned off its beak...
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And finally we saw a coyote running down the road following the center line pretty well...
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And that was all before about 2 PM! All in all an interesting day, we thought.
More tomorrow ....
Keith
Thanks for the update on momma moose and her calf. I was curious how they were doing.
