From science writer Ned Rozell: Memories of biologist Vic Van Ballenberghe, who knew Alaska's moose like no other
Vic Van Ballenberghe died on Sept. 22, 2022, at the age of 78. The man who knew moose better than perhaps anyone else on Earth had stood amid their knobby legs for many springs and falls in Interior Alaska. I got to join him in the field once, 11 years ago. Here is my story from that day:
The giant moose strolls over a brownish slope that waits for snow. The creature pauses at times, steering with massive antlers one of the cows that orbit him.The sight of eight moose at once is a treat for me, Van Ballenberghe’s guest for the day, but the 67-year-old biologist has stood close enough to smell the musk of these moose every spring and fall since 1980. That’s the year he first visited the park and knew he had found the perfect place to study the behavior of this iconic large mammal.
The late Vic Van Ballenberghe, who studied moose for decades, drives the Denali Park road in late September 2011. Van Ballenberghe knows that Denali Park cow moose can live to be 20 — “it’s like a 100-year-old person” — and most of its bulls are gone by the age of 13. He once observed a cow that gave birth in almost the exact same spot for 12 consecutive years.
Mostly, he sees and studies moose, sometimes approaching them so close he can hear them breathe. In this era of satellite tracking and circling animals with aircraft, he has kept alive what he described in his book as an “old-fashioned, naturalistic approach of directly observing wild animals at close range.”He is critical of Alaska’s predator-control program, claiming that too much emphasis is put on killing wolves and that decision-makers don’t listen enough to scientists.
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