Note: On December 16, 2016, the National Park Service put forward a draft plan to add 20-30 new wolves to Isle Royale. The plan is currently undergoing public review. With two wolves roaming the island and more than 1,300 moose living there, the Park Service is attempting to restore “natural” order to the island before the moose over browse, destroying plant life and then dying of starvation. This has happened before. Perhaps many times before.
Wildlife photographer and outdoor writer George Shiras first visited Isle Royale in 1886, and at the time, he penned, “I neither saw nor heard any moose there. Later, perhaps at the time of the ice bridge to the mainland, the winter of 1912, they appear to have colonized the island and found conditions so favorable that they increased with amazing rapidity. Some years later the number on the island was estimated to exceed 2,000.”
Shiras, who has been called the “father of wildlife photography,” published Hunting Wild Life with Camera and Flashlight: A record of Sixty-Five Years’ Visits to the Woods and Waters of North America in 1935. Information for this article came from that record.
Like today, ice bridges between Isle Royale and the mainland of Ontario or Minnesota were rare.
“The surface of Lake Superior never entirely freezes over,” Shiras scripted in his photo journal. “But during exceptionally hard winters the western end of the lake surrounding Isle Royale is covered with ice, an ice bridge thus formed between it and the mainland.
“In ordinary winters this bridge is repeatedly broken by winds and current, so that crossing it is a perilous undertaking. In very cold seasons, however, it may remain unbroken for a long time, as in 1912 when it continued during January and February.”
During 1912, Shiras also reported that “The State Conservation Commission placed nine white-tailed deer there. Apparently, the moose found conditions on the island far more suited to their needs than did the deer, for the moose increased remarkably, while the deer seem to have become extinct…
“In addition to the many moose and formerly a few caribou, the fauna of this island includes coyotes (locally known as brush wolf), Canada lynx, mink, weasel, red squirrel, beaver, muskrat, and snowshoe rabbit.”
Over the next decade, Shiras published papers fearing the moose would eat all of the food on the island and would starve. His predictions proved to be right.
“Previous to 1929 I published statements to this effect. In that year it became apparent that the situation I feared was developing more rapidly than I anticipated. From a correspondent I learned that during the summer of 1929 a survey of conditions on the island revealed abundant evidence of serious over browsing which, from the appearance of the forest, must have been going on for several years.”
Pictured in 1929 were conservation workers who captured starving calves and transported them to the mainland to relieve the overstocked conditions on the island.
Other images displayed destruction of ground hemlock, and that many of the aspens, conifers, mountain ash, and other small trees on which the moose had fed had been denuded of branches up to a height of eight to 10 feet. That is as high as a bull moose can reach and well beyond the scope of the cows and calves.
In 1929 it was estimated about 1,000 moose lived on the island. In 1931 Mr. Walter E. Hastings and Mr. Ben East, of the Michigan Conservation Commission, visited the island with an airplane and “made a careful and thorough survey to determine the approximate number of moose. They were amazed to find the animals much less numerous than expected. They worked the island by airplane and on snowshoes and finally estimated that the island contained only about 500 moose, which lived mainly on the then plentiful white birch,” Shiras explained.
By 1933-34 the Michigan Department of Conservation said an unusually severe winter and a heavy snowfall destroyed all of the younger moose and that only about 75 adult animals survived.
Leave a Reply