GPS satellite phone collar rescue Minnesota's moose

From Voyageurs National Park on the west to the Grand Portage Reservation on the east, researchers from a half-dozen agencies are trying to discover why the Northland’s moose are in decline. New GPS/satellite phone collars may help them get answers.It’s also the first study to track moose on both sides of the international border, with several in Quetico Provincial Park now collared and monitored.

Researchers want to know where moose are going to eat, rest and seek shade and cool water on warm days, and where they go to have their calves and to die. And that’s what this $1.1 million project, funded through federal, state, tribal and provincial sources, is expected to do. Researchers can even overlay what the weather was like, including the temperature, for each position recorded by the GPS.

The work is done in the winter when the black/ brown moose stand out against the snow in the leafless forest, and when marshes and bogs are frozen over.After Northwestern Minnesota’s moose population crashed from 4,000 to just a few dozen over the past 25 years, Northeastern Minnesota moose now are showing similar warning signs. Fewer calves are surviving their first year, and overall moose numbers are trending down.

The new GPS/satellite phone collars ($3,500 each) offer researchers a new world of data. In a pilot project last year, collars on 21 moose in Voyageurs and Grand Portage provided tens of thousands of data-points over just a few months – exactly where each moose was every 20 minutes.

The GPS unit on the collar will take a reading every 20 minutes for at least the next two years, and every four hours a tiny satellite phone calls a researcher’s computer at the Natural Resources Research Institute in Duluth and sends the coordinates.Minnesota moose have been studied for years, but mostly with radio-transmitter collars that require researchers to recapture the moose to recover the data. That requires expensive and time-consuming airplane flights to keep track of the animals. And it may be days or weeks before researchers know the animal is dead.

So far Northeastern Minnesota’s moose population has not dropped to a crisis level. The DNR broadly estimates there are about 6,000 moose in their core survey area in Cook, Lake and northeastern St. Louis counties. But state, federal and regional researchers want to find out all they can before that number drops more.Some moose experts have questioned whether Minnesota moose can survive higher temperatures when they are already at the southern edge of their North American range.’Next winter, if money from the state’s Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund is approved, DelGiudice and DNR veterinarian Erika Butler hope to put GPS/satellite phone collars another 100 moose to expand the overall study to more than 160.

While Moen’s work focuses on habitat and when and why moose uses certain parts of the forest, DelGiudice and Butler will look at what’s killing the moose.The GPS/satellite collars will allow researchers to know within about 4 hours if a moose stops moving and is likely dead, and, they hope, to get to the dead animal within 24 hours so it can be retrieved for a necropsy.