If you read the news in Colorado, you could be forgiven for thinking that the state was being invaded by moose. In recent years, dozens of news articles have chronicled expanding moose populations in the Southern Rockies. Most assert that moose are non-native, with local history beginning when they were transferred by the Colorado Division of Wildlife in the late 1970s.
In December, Rocky Mountain National Park initiated a public comment period for its National Environmental Policy Act application to begin addressing high moose populations within the park, sparking a new blitz of news coverage on moose.
One article published this month included interviews with RMNP staff and claimed “before the Colorado Division of Wildlife introduced moose into the state in 1978, it was rare to see the species. Moose would occasionally wander into Colorado from Wyoming, but there were no sustained populations.”
This bold and oft-repeated assertion is not supported by evidence. As scientists who study ancient animal populations, we believe such claims demand rigorous scrutiny before they drive policy decisions that might be hard to undo. Last fall, we conducted a review of historical records and found dozens of moose encounters documented in diaries, newspapers and photographs. These records confirm moose have lived in Colorado as far back as written records go. RMNP has now revised some of their public messaging, suggesting that moose were rare rather than totally absent.
But this is still a misinterpretation of the historic record. Before systematic wildlife surveys, written accounts only occasionally captured encounters with solitary, backcountry animals like moose — making them an unreliable measure of actual populations.
Our visit to the archives of former CDW biologist Dick Denney revealed that state wildlife officials clearly understood the 1978 translocations as reintroductions. And importantly, the archives highlight the patchiness of the written record — Denney himself recorded many verbal-only accounts of moose in the decades before reintroduction.
Looking at records from across the Rockies (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah), we found that in each state, there was only a scattered historic record of moose before the mid-20th century, and confusion about the presence, absence or abundance of moose in earlier times. After our investigation, Colorado now boasts among the largest tallies of early moose records west of the Mississippi. These records unequivocally document reproductively active, locally residing moose, including cows, calves and bulls.
Although the written records don’t extend much beyond the mid-19th century, it is not clear how far back this history might go. Moose form an important part of the stories and traditions of Colorado’s Native cultures, and published identifications of moose appear in the state’s archaeological record, from the ruins of Mesa Verde to the Paleoindian period thousands of years ago.
As Colorado faces drought, climate change, and a host of difficult challenges today, the expansion of moose populations in RMNP, and their impact on the area’s willow and beaver habitat, is a real ecological problem that deserves attention, and perhaps intervention. But the park’s framing — that the problem is a moose invasion — is not supported by scientific evidence.
Large herbivores, willows and beavers coexisted across North America for millennia, because predation, disease, fire, floods and human hunting gave browsed areas time to recover. Park Service policies have historically suppressed many of these forces, subjecting unfenced willow stands to constant browsing pressure. But elsewhere in Colorado, moose populations are being effectively managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife through hunting, with most growth occurring through range expansion, not overpopulation.
Management choices available to the park range from culling and extermination to cooperative partnerships with state wildlife officials and Tribes. In Olympic National Park, a similarly questionable designation of mountain goats as non-native has led to decades of helicopter-based removal. Whatever Rocky Mountain National Park decides for the local moose population, it is important that we get the facts straight: Moose have been in Colorado for centuries.
William Taylor is an archaeozoologist and assistant professor/curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. John Wendt is a paleoecologist and assistant professor of rangeland ecosystem management at New Mexico State University.
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