This week I started my annual moose calling ritual to photograph bull moose. I use my mouth and a fiberglass megaphone making “Love Sick” calls of a cow moose. I stopped at an old logging cut and started to call. I just get out of the truck and hear two bulls fighting about one hundred feet into the woods. Of all the places along this road that I could have stopped I happen to stop right beside two fighting bull moose. What are the odds?

I start calling and they stop fighting for about a minute and then start up again. It is hard to describe the sounds echoing through the valley as two huge bull moose clatter their antlers together. It is something you have to experience. This goes on for about twenty minutes. I just listen and call intermittently. I wait them out while enjoying the experience of hearing them fight. 

They stop fighting and one of the moose is grunting and walking off in the distance. I guess they were fighting to see who got to go after this new cow that showed up. There in front of me steps out what I’m thinking is the bigger one and the winner of the battle. As soon as he got on the road a vehicle comes around the corner. This perspective really shows the size of a bull moose. 

I continue calling so the moose keeps coming and doesn’t step off the road. He is trotting now so it doesn’t take him long to get to me.  Within a few seconds the only thing between me and this thousand-pound moose is the hood of my truck. I stop calling and he goes past the truck and into the brush still looking for that cow.