Things That Go Bump In The Alaskan Night

I was just getting ready to crawl into bed, when my phone started sending a series of pings  "Someone is at your doorbell"  "Someone is at your doorbell"  "Someone is at your doorbell"  OK, OK...I get it, the snow shovelling people are strangely nocturnal.  Or it could be a burglar.  My doorbell cam batteries are dangerously low in this cold weather so I will just go peek.  When I flicked on the outside light I was met with this.

Yup, so, the good news is that despite the brown fur and a bit of hump, the ears are all wrong for a grizzly.

There is quite literally a moose on the loose on my doorstep.  

The moose, it seems, is also nocturnal and most likely to turn up around midnight.  My best guess is the snow shovellers put down some salt when they were by earlier.  I noticed the ice on the step was melting and they had not come back, so I shovelled the loose stuff up and tossed it on that snow berm, which the moose was happily sucking on here...so am guessing they must have put some salt down.  Moose need salt and it's hard for them to come by in the winter.  A few days ago someone posted on facebook that 4 moose were surrounding a vehicle licking all the salt off of it.

So I watched my moose burglar for a while.  It's a pretty big creature, and the deadbolt suddenly looks very small.  I couldn't help but think of the character "Moos-a-taur", the bloodthirsty undead murdering moose villain from a local indie film.  I comforted myself that moose don't have thumbs (as you can tell by the little cloven hooves), and probably don't like stairs.

But as you can see, this is no Moose-a-taur.  This is a very sweet, probably quite young moose, most likely a calf that was born near here and is in his/her second season and pops up from the river trail in an area that has his/her mom used to bring them outrunning the bears.  It's never a good idea to get too close to a moose, and moose know it's never a good idea to get too close to a human.  But my guess is this one knows there is a boundary where the humans start and the bears usually end, and has it as part of its territory.  Was glad to see the little cutie move on out to a safer, wooded area.

Hey, let me in.

Not sure if this is the way the moose came or went, but I am grateful the mooseberries were deposited by the treeline instead of my front step.  Never a dull moment up here.