All photos in this publication Copyright Š 2014 by Dan Campbell
danlmac@orbitelcom.com
Moose Encounter It's September 25, 2014. Our annual September trip to McCall, Idaho is nearing an end. We've taken a number of day trips in the McCall area and have encountered quite a bit of wildlife, but our encounters with moose have been infrequent, distant, and fleeting. We decide to take one last drive around Payette Lake. As we're rounding a bend in the dirt road at the north end of the lake, near where the Payette River flows into the lake, we see something in the middle of the river, and we both assume that it's a tree stump. When we get closer, we realize it's a bull moose, standing stock-still, looking upriver. Upriver, there stands another bull moose, looking quite a bit bigger and more robust than the one in the foreground. We soon figure out that what we are seeing is a young bull moose challenging an older bull – there must be a female in the vicinity somewhere. We, along with a number of others who wander by, hang around for about half an hour, taking in the drama and snapping lots of photos. Eventually the younger bull is either distracted by the onlookers (including a pair in a kayak who got dangerously close) or decides his chances aren't good, so he climbs out of the river and disappears in the underbrush. We go upriver a little way, and sure enough, there is la femme! While I was fooling around with my high-tech, high-dollar lenses on my high-tech, high-dollar camera and having trouble getting anything decent, Paulette was busy snapping photos with my backup camera. All the photos in this album are hers. Not one of mine made the cut. But her photos saved the day (as Bullwinkle used to say).