Two huge bull moose in rural Teton County suffered a rare and terrible fate recently when they fought each other to exhaustion and, with their antlers locked together, fell over and drowned in a creek.
“If one falls over, then the other one is probably going to fall over, and there you have it,” Mark Gocke, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department spokesman for the Jackson and Pinedale regions, told Cowboy State Daily.
The carcasses of the bulls were discovered earlier this month in Fish Creek on private property near Wilson and reported to Game and Fish.
Unintended Dire Consequences
During the fall rut, or mating season, it’s not unusual for bull moose to spar — sometimes violently — over access to cows.
A video of three bull moose having a shoving match in the Snowy Range Mountains taken by wildlife photographer Greg Bergquist of Rawlins recently gained national attention.
Bull moose generally don’t go into such contests with deadly intent, Gocke said. Instead, they usually spar or fight until one or the other backs down.
In some rare instances, bull moose, or bull elk and buck deer, will get their antlers locked together, and that can lead to more dire consequences.
In the case of the moose in Fish Creek, they had the misfortune of being in enough water to drown in when one bull apparently became too tired to stand any longer and dragged the other with him as he fell, Gocke said.
There were no witnesses to the fatal battle, but the sequence of events could be reasonably surmised by the position of the carcasses, he said.
“The two bull moose had clearly been sparring as part of the rut, gotten locked together and could not get apart,” he said. “And my take is that they fought until they were exhausted and went down in Fish Creek and ultimately drown.”
That’s an extremely rare way for moose to die. But oddly enough, it happened to two bull moose about five years ago, also near Wilson.
“They, too, ended up fighting to exhaustion and drowning in a pond,” Gocke said, adding that “this is not a common thing by any means.”
Death Lock
The massive moose carcasses were far too heavy to move out of the creek by hand, but fortunately the landowner had a skid steer (a multipurpose piece of construction equipment) and offered to help.
Using the machine to extract the carcasses demonstrated just how hopelessly the entangled the bulls had become before they died, Gocke said.
“Even when pulling those suckers with the skid steer, they were locked together until one of their antler tines broke, and that freed them up,” he said.
The bulls both had huge antler racks, Gocke said. One measured roughly 50 inches across and the other about 45 inches.
The carcasses were thought to have been in the creek for about two days before they were discovered, rendering the meat inedible. The were hauled to a nearby landfill for disposal.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
