Isle Royale Forums

**note to reader: due to filesize issues, photos [none of which are mine, due to a May 15 incident described below] are linked to rather than attached. As befits my longest-ever trip to IR, this report is not short. I've broken it down into installments.**

Introduction. Biologists have been studying the predator-prey system on Isle Royale for almost 70 years. The predators are wolves. The prey are moose. In the Winter Study phase of the research, hardy scientists based at Windigo venture out by snowshoe and bushplane to observe wolf-moose interactions. These interactions don’t always end happily for the moose. Those that end most unhappily are the crux of Moosewatch, the summer study phase of the research. Moosewatch dispatches small teams of mad-keen volunteers to known kill sites to collect the most informative parts of the unlucky moose, and to bring those parts back for additional scrutiny. Because the scientists are interested in how everything fits together, a Moosewatch team’s brief extends beyond wolf-killed moose to all dead moose they find, as well to monitoring other environmental signals of interest. Essentially, Moosewatch licenses its participants to scour the woods looking for cool and/or gross stuff.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/rnzZe4dWvaxfX7Qw9

Having participated earlier this month in my first Moosewatch, I can wholeheartedly attest that it’s spectacularly fun, thought-provoking, and meaningful. If you’re the sort of person who’s tempted to consider volunteering for something like this to begin with---and not everyone is!---follow that temptation! In case it helps, here is a partial chronicle of my experiences as a rookie Moosewatcher.

More about the project in general. It turns out that live moose are considerably more adept at keeping their bones in roughly one place than dead moose are. Moose legs in particular ---Isle Royale’s answer to carryout food---seem especially susceptible to winding up some distance from their body of origin. This creates a problem of deceased moose individuation: what counts as finding an individual dead moose worth collecting? An isolated bone doesn’t cut it. Each individual dead moose typically scatters their bones far and wide. The prevailing Moosewatch convention is to individuate dead moose by their heads: if you’ve found a skull (or a mandible or even an incisor), you’ve found a collectable moose. You get to proudly strap that skull (along with any antlers protruding therefrom) to your pack and parade it back to Windigo at the end of the week. If you can find a metatarsal or a hoof that goes with the skull, so much the better. They get to join your float in the parade of moose remains. Likewise joints pocked by damage from osteo-arthritis. Detached antlers, and moose bones you can’t find skulls to go with, you document and leave behind.

More about this year, and my team. Some years, some of Moosewatch resembles a macabre version of geocaching. You head toward “targets”---GPS coordinates of kill sites observed from the air during Winter Study---and scrape up what awaits you there, opportunistically collecting bonus bones on the way. But taking off from and landing on Lake Superior ice isn’t trivial. Not many pilots have the chops to fly Winter Study. And none of them were available this past year. So we didn’t have any targets, just an assigned search area: the backcountry surrounding Feldtmann Lake. We searched it by plunging stalwartly into the underbrush, no matter how dense and scratchy the underbrush was. We’d maintain a ragged picket line along a compass bearing, and bellow “BONE!” or “SHED!” or “I FOUND A BODY!” as appropriate. Then we’d gather to process the finding.

Bellowing “MARCO” was also allowed, if it had been long enough since you’d seen or heard any of your teammates that you were becoming concerned that you’d come unhitched in the depths of an endless cedar swamp. Teammates in earshot respond “POLO”.

My four teammates were a magnificent bunch of human beings: supportive, curious, hilarious, patient---and outlandishly skilled in matters Moosewatch. By amassing an overwhelming volume of photographic and physical evidence, our leader is single-handedly bringing the state of Wisconsin to recognize that it has a resident moose population. Another veteran of many Moosewatches is a competitive orienteer who writes research reports for the Wolf-Moose Foundation newsletter. Then there were two doctors with unimpeachably Moosewatch-y specialties (emergency medicine, for mishaps; toxicology, for ill-advised foraging; radiology, for telling which bones are which) and who were the sorts of outdoorspeople who not only had custom-made backpacks but really deserved them.

Then there was me, an elderly philosophy professor who likes to go on walks. My contribution was to handle the metaphysical questions that came up as we searched the hinterland for moose carcasses.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/KfC5qCURNu6vcU3v7

We found over 20 sheds, 6 collectable moose, and a fair number of teaser bones we couldn’t manage to associate with anyone collectable. My personal tally was one shed and a few teaser bones. On the other hand, I was the undisputed team leader in bellowing “MARCO.” And I turned out to have a flair for finding man-made objects.

May 10. The fully refurbished Hat Point Ferry Terminal is somewhat disorienting---so much asphalt! Such spiffy bathrooms!!---but I manage to find the (not remotely refurbished but profoundly loved) Voyageur II anyway. The Moosewatchers disembark in Windigo, receive their group gear and their marching orders, and started marching. En route to Feldtmann, we traverse snow patches on the flats near Windigo. After climbing out of those flats, we follow the spur to the Grace Creek overlook ----only to have our view disrupted by a bull moose placidly browsing in the foreground. He is utterly unconcerned with our presence, and munching so loudly we can hear his teeth (although probably not his incisors) grind the vegetation.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/toEVjYxJ7YJvVfop9

Back on the trail to Feldtmann, we see two more (inconsiderately live) moose, two garter snakes, and a snowshoe hare---a species whose living instances we’re supposed to keep count of. We set up in Group Site One and familiarize ourselves with campground amenities. These include a campground hare (who essentially never stops circling our tents, inducing us to abandon our hare-counting mission), an ominously deceased bald eagle splayed trailside just south of camp, a pair of pit toilets that live up to their names altogether too well, and two new food lockers our orienteer discovers on a recreational bushwack before dinner. 350 pounds apiece, they’d been deposited by what must have been a harried helicopter crew about 100 meters north of camp in a small lakeside clearing that wasn’t exactly flat. They’re totally usable, just not exactly conspicuously placed. Thanks to our incessant to-ing and fro-ing, there’s now an incipient use trail from Group Site 1 to the lockers. To find it, just go to where the orienteer’s tent used to be, and follow the shore.

Feldtmann Lake Campground’s greatest amenity is Feldtmann Lake, which is as still as glass and ornamented by mergansers.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8BxNx9cCwTkxn4Ju5


to be continued . . .

(continued)

May 11. Today, we start to search in earnest. We head off-trial, west then north of the lake. Our first serious action is a teaser leg bone near a minor swamp. From a tree near the teaser bone, our leader hangs a blaze orange safety vest fragrant with putrefaction. We fan out hoping to find more collectable parts. To my astonishment, I stumble across something that might be a moose bone---or a branch, or a substantial fibrous plant. As I said, this is not my area of expertise. Responding to my tentative cry of “bone,” our leader confirms that I have indeed located another (non-collectable) deceased moose piece. I am over the moon.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/uiYagkBfhcz8r4bs7

However an extensive search fails to turn up any money bones. We carry on hoping for better luck. Gauged by collectable bone count, we don’t have much: a shed or two.
Very roughly, the two habitats we traverse today are swamp and hardwood forest. The swamp is beautiful: pools of tea-dark water sporting madcap tussocks and other Dr Seuss adornments (pitcher plants, skunk cabbage), brightened by sunny bursts of baby swamp marigolds. The swamp is also cruel. All the surfaces are vegetable, and none can be relied upon to support your weight should you trust them to. The living brush is very thick and very dense and very pointy. And I turn out to have next to no aptitude for bushwacking. Three things I needed to learn, but hadn’t yet: first, not to do it by feel. (My initial MO was to identify obstacles by whamming my shins into them, then to scrape those same shins across them to make sure I was clearing them.) Second, I didn’t need to literally and every second follow the compass bearing. (I eventually figured out that the wisest paths of least resistance to take instead, when they presented themselves, were game trails, as they tended to be relatively rich in moose parts.). Third, my attitude was all wrong. I’m used to cruising down trails and getting there. But I needed to reframe. Bushwacking goes better if you make it about being there. On all these fronts I made progress---but not soon enough to save my shins. As for today, it was hot and I was thirsty and a Cartman voice was screaming in my head, “stop trying to trip and stab me, you stupid forest!”

https://photos.app.goo.gl/CeMvvhjtjo9FWWgd7

Hardwood forests are, on the one hand, much easier to navigate. On the other, they’re mostly bereft of things moose want to eat, and correspondingly bereft of signs of moose living or dead. Our campsite, by contrast, teems with activity overnight---munching and rustling and scampering, all vivid in the windless and quiet night.


May 12. In the morning, it emerges that some of the rustling was due to wolves, one of whom brushed against the tent of, and was seen by, a member of our party. We resolve to transfer our food and other smellables to the food lockers while we’re out searching. Already, and out of aversion to the bushwacking involved, I hadn’t exactly been rushing to volunteer to bushwack to and from the food locker with our bags of smellables. It did not increase my enthusiasm for this task to learn that a possible pack of possibly ravenous wolves might actually be marauding our campground. In the hopes of cloaking my cowardly shirking, I very frequently and very flagrantly collect water for the team gravity filter---which I also very eventually figured out how to use. A testament to the kindness of my teammates is that none of them ever called me on this transparent gambit.

We hoof it, on trail, to the fire tower on Feldtmann ridge. The sky is a cloudless and brilliant blue; the air crystal clear, albeit inappropriately warm. The views---back over Feldtmannn Lake to our camp and Lake Superior beyond; east toward Siskiwit Bay and environs, which other Moosewatch teams are combing for bones---are very lovely and very Isle Royale. But we have expired moose to find!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/BZvPC5JvjkHcQqcD7

Dropping off the ridge to the south and west, we trace a giant shallow off-trail vee that rejoins the ridge trail not far from where it starts to plummet back toward Feltmann Lake. So abundant are the sheds that even I found one. There are intermittent teaser bones; a beaver pelvis adds a little variety. But we are almost two full days into our mission, and still hadn’t found a countable moose.
Enter Armando. Armando initially presents as an almost entirely buried shed, spied by a sharp-eyed doctor, even though the antler was the exact same color as the duff engulfing it. In the course of excavating the antler for measurement, we see that the shed is anything but: the antler comes attached to a SKULL, which therefore qualifies as collectable moose. But not an easily collectable moose, due to how crumbly Armando had become over the years of his repose. We disinter as many intact bits as we could, and package them for the trip back to Windigo. To their discoverer falls the honor of bearing them.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/g5KuuxA57hDSLuGi6

To their discoverer also falls the honor of naming the collectable moose, the convention being moose---like hurricanes---are named in alphabetical order, and---unlike hurricanes--- thematically. “Armando” felt like an Italian name, which turns our thoughts to Italian names starting with “B.” Mildly addled by minor heatstroke, the best we can manage on that front is “Benito.” And that’s how we decide our collectable moose would be named for fascists, despots, and dictators.
We have a long but happy march back to camp. It might tell you something about the team that our good cheer survives the discovery, upon our return, of something that might have registered as a debacle---the effects, on our carefully-curated victuals, of being left all day in a baking hot food locker. In an effort to get into the midwestern swing of things, the east coast rookie had brought some blocks of cheese, each of which had separated in the extreme heat into alarming amounts of cheese sweat and equally alarming semi-desiccated lactoid solids. My sea-salted caramels, intended as cherished treats, had fused into a morass vaguely suggestive of the poop of moose feeding on aquatic vegetation. The orienteer’s very dark chocolate survived intact, though, and he shared. Resolving to locker our food overnight but hang it during the day tomorrow, we retire.

(to be continued . . . )

May 13. From Feldtmann ridge, we thought we’d spotted some high ground we could exploit to negotiate the swamplands south and east of Feldtmann Lake. We follow the trail past the eagle corpse and over the bridge across the Feldtmann outlet, then take a hard left. Readily traversed high ground proves elusive. And the swamp proves to be a bit of stinker. Even if it were wall-to-wall moose bits, I wouldn’t have spotted any, so focused was I on placing my feet in places conducive to survival. After the trip, everyone who hadn’t hurled their phone into a swamp deposited photos in a shared google album. There weren’t many from today, I suspect because each of us was concentrating so hard on swampwacking that we didn’t have much attention left for photography.
We did have a considerable amount of attention for a mystery awaiting us back at camp. Our food bag still hung in the tree intact, but it had been scored on both sides by long gashes that looked for all the world like the marks Wile E. Coyote leaves when his attempt to cling to a cliff face with his claws fails, sending him sliding helplessly into the Grand Canyon. A learned dispute breaks out about whether these marks had been left by wolves or by the wind brushing the bag against the very sharp branches protruding radially from lower down the tree than hang branch. I root, very passionately, for the latter.
I concede that I’m wrong when the rest of my team witnesses a wolf passing through the campground. (Why I miss this: I am in my tent writing down a list, consisting of the campground hare, of animals I’d seen today. Draw your own conclusions.)

May 14. Today we bushwack west to the Superior shore, parallel it to Cumberland point, then bushwack east to the trail, which we follow home. And our collecting begins in earnest. We collect variegated garbage that washes up on shore. By number, mylar balloons dominate. By weight, a blazing white boat bumper roughly the size and shape of an obese corgi. It winds up strapped to a valiant teammate’s custom-made pack. Back at Windigo, a moosewatcher from another team, whose own boat could use another bumper, assumes responsibility for it.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/KK9Y8AAxGuroywAC8
https://photos.app.goo.gl/fvQEHR9MC1raK1vg9

After a futile search for collectable parts to go with a mossy teaser bone I find on a game trail, we take a lunch break. The break lasts so long that a marten we’d unwittingly treed becomes exasperated, and decides to stop hiding. Scuttling magnificently to earth, the marten races, more or less across our laps, into some adjacent bushes.

There are sheds aplenty, and more teaser bones, one in an open space where our leader detects the unmistakable stench of death. We spread out, nostrils flared, hoping to locate its source. I find purple plastic tags stamped with numbers. While I’m working out that they’re (earless) ear tags, Armando’s discoverer yells “I FOUND A BODY.”

https://photos.app.goo.gl/TVVCwsngBxwzo9fv6

Benito is a (very freshly) wolf-killed yearling moose, much wetter than I’d hoped (but had no right to expect) our findings to be. Although most of his skeleton had been picked (sort of) clean, his lower legs are still covered in hair and flesh, which oozes uncoagulated blood when the determined doctors collaborate on severing a hoof. I find another set of ear tags, whose number matches the number on the purple ones found upfield. I also “volunteer” to collect wolf poop, a task that, while it is not absolutely inviting, strikes me as more inviting than processing Benito. I’m meant to scoop up a few pea-sized samples that don’t contain hair or bone---but I come to appreciate that wolf poop near a kill site is basically a tangle of moose hair held into a turd shape by a sheen of fecal matter. I collect anyway, and trust science to learn from the sample.
Benito’s head, hoof, metatarsal, and ear-tags get double bagged, and carried back to camp, where they’re hung high, lest the marauding wolves get them. Hung not so high, but high enough, is the commodious tarp we’d been issued as group gear. The weather, which has been way more summery than is entirely decent, is changing.

May 15. Rain starts overnight and continues through breakfast, which we enjoy huddled together under the tarp. We start out in raingear, but wriggle out of it as the weather lifts. Our objective is a region believed to be moose-y; getting there entails skirting, then plunging through, a cedar swamp. During the skirting phase, our leader--- heroically following the toughest, because most swamp-adjacent, line---emits a crescendo of yells. “BONE! SKULL!! SKELETON!!!” Caligula, who appears to have perished without the assistance of wolves, is a moose much drier than Benito and much less crumbly than Armando---pretty much the perfect Moosewatch moose, if you ask me. I shirk my core duties to take pictures of some teammates nerding out on the anatomical jigsaw puzzle Caligula presents, and other teammates searching the swamp with tenacious joy for further puzzle pieces.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/W5vstq822QGn3moz9

https://photos.app.goo.gl/rPcmf1ShSRcZPhb96

Caligula’s skull is dry, and sturdy enough to be strapped directly to a pack. With her in tow, we plunge deeper into the swamp. Off and on I follow a teammate who travels established trails like a (fit and experienced) mortal, but who skims over off-trail impediments like an elf. I figure studying his technique might help me achieve the zen of bushwacking. The swamp has different ideas, though. A piece of it maliciously leaps up to wrap itself around my ankle, and I pitch headfirst toward the murk. Although I manage to avert a full faceplant, I do dunk the bill of my hat in tea-dark swampwater. But no damage done.

At least not to me. About 20 minutes later, I want to take more pictures, and reach for my phone, only to recognize, in quick succession that (i) it’s not there, (ii) rather than putting it in a secure pocket, as I’d been trying to make my bushwacking policy, I’d deposited it a drop-in pocket after the Caligula photoshoot, and (iii) probably, it had shot out of that pocket when I almost did the faceplant in the swamp. The team offers to help me go back and look for the phone, but given the vanishing probability of success, and figuring I’d come to Isle Royale to disconnect from it all, I decline.

(to be continued)

(May 15, continued)

Not much later, we come across teaser bone in a beaver meadow. Once again, our leader catches, and follows, the whiff of death. Donald is a nearly-complete recently wolf-killed moose entirely unrelated to the teaser bone. She’s not as wet as Benito, but she’s still pretty wet. We settle into the increasingly familiar routine of combing her hairmat (a carpet of moosehair mysteriously left by wolves at kill sites) for incisors and searching her environs for other missing parts. The latter search turns up an intriguing find: a brainpan that’s not Donald’s---hers is with the rest of her---but might be a small wolf’s. Or a large beaver’s. We’re undecided. We take it back to Windigo too.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/uouu9dQRPgzP3ARm6

Donald’s collectable parts get double-bagged and strapped to the bouy-bearing backpack. An intrepid satellite party mounts a foray across a tricky creek---and finds another collectable skull. Because it’s getting late, we decide to return tomorrow to process it. We chart a pleasantly straightforward route back to the trail, and return to camp escorted by late-afternoon sunshine and a pair of (live) moose, warier than the overlook moose, we startle while they’re browsing near trail.

Camp has another surprise in store for. When they reach the junction with the spur trail to Feldtmann Lake, one of our vanguard yells to the rest of us “RUN FOR IT.” That junction is serving as some sort of wormhole to a north Atlantic hurricane. Raging winds are whipping up whitecaps on Feldtmann lake. Borne by the raging winds, a freezing mist stings exposed skin. So thick is the mist that the atmosphere is dark and foreboding. Despairing of getting our stoves to light in the gale, we retreat to a clearing just west of the main trail. On the good side of the wormhole, it’s sunny and calm, and we have a first-class picnic. Fiddleheads we’d foraged earlier are expertly prepared---steamed with nori and miso in a Jetboil---by a teammate who’d evolved gourmet strategies for subsisting on fish caught while hiking the John Muir Trail.

Back on the bad side of the wormhole, it seems certain that we’re in for one doozy of a storm. Despite their taut pitches, both tents closest to shore collapse under the onslaught. An exercise that consolidates a team already soundly-built is to repitch them with guylines. That done, we retreat to our tents for an awesome sound and light show, followed by rains that, in all honesty, don’t live up to the hype.

May 16. Our agenda for today is to pack up our somewhat damp camp, take a different route to the collectable skull we didn’t collect yesterday, collect that skull and any others we happen upon, and proceed to a clearing, partway back to Windigo but well off-trail, where one of us camped with their team during Moosewatch 2024.

The vicinity of E-melda, the collectable skull, abounds in teaser bones and sheds, including a prodigious matched pair that I’m not strong enough to pose with unassisted.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/4BVTMQRTawEBZm7L9
https://photos.app.goo.gl/SFdVMfgnV4NBpbo37

But we don’t succeed in finding other collectable moose. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, we already had: at Windigo, the dispute over whether yesterday’s bonus skull was a supersized beaver or a miniwolf receives a surprise resolution: it was a moose calf, Franco, bringing our count to 6.

When we reach the off-trail campsite, our guide sends a satellite message to a teammate from last year, reporting that we were camping at “their” spot. The teammate asks us to look for a solar charger that might have been left there, “on a log near a tree.” Having spent over a week on an island covered almost uniformly with logs near trees, we get a pretty good laugh out of that.

We pass a bittersweet evening, our last together as just our team, enjoying the sunset, a vast range of birdcall, an equally vast range of food ration dregs, and the company of one another. After retiring, some of us find the resident owls, a pair of which hoot manically at one another deep into the night, less enjoyable company

May 17. Returning from my post-breakfast visit to the woods, I cement my reputation as a man-made object detector. I spy, on a log next to a tree, a solar charger. (A reconstruction of the incident is depicted below.)

https://photos.app.goo.gl/fXae6ojd8iMbrjNVA

The charger gets added to the bones, and the poop samples, and the hooves, and the tarsals, and the mylar balloons, and the boat bumpers, and all the other finds---welcome, unwelcome, wondrous, mystifying, ugly, smelly, and sublime---we carry back to Windigo, where we join other teams for Moosewatch closing ceremonies. If you want to find out about those, join Moosewatch!

May 18. It snows a little. The Voyageur transports us back to Grand Portage.

Great detailed report! Thank you! Gives a wonderfully realistic view of what Moosewatch is all about. Something I'd love to be able to do, but I'm old and wise enough to know that's unrealistic (without regrettable consequences). Are you thinking ahead to next year ... or was this enough?

Thanks for the report! It's good to hear your firsthand experience. Alas for your phone though--may it rest in peace. And may you have future opportunities for longer trips to the island!

Wonderful report! Thank you for sharing your experience. Makes me want to this.


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Wonderful log. Makes me think twice about doing Moosewatch...

Also, from your last post, I know how to get your phone back: Get next year's teams to find it for you!

Absolutely delightful.

Ingo wrote: Fri May 30, 2025 4:22 pm Are you thinking ahead to next year ... or was this enough?

Although this was plenty, I am hoping for return engagements. For one thing, I haven't yet achieved the zen of bushwhacking!

I wouldn't be the first returnee: the vast majority of team 1 were repeat offenders.

There's something called Moosewatch for Educators --- I'm not sure what the eligibility criteria are --- that's reputed to be a somewhat gentler introduction to the form of life.

Great report. I've learned that it may not be wise to leave my food in the storage locker during my zero mile/layover days.

Thanks for the behind the curtain glimpse. I participated in Moosewatch for Educators in 2022. Your posts bring back vivid memories of the sights, sounds, and (unfortunately) smells of that experience. How did the Educator trip compare to the pure Moosewatch? Sounds pretty similar, sans wolves staking out our camp. We also got some canoe time in and got to visit the Moose-eum where they stash all the finds of the summer. Pretty spectacular eating lunch surrounded by 100-200 moose skulls.

Thanks again for your painstaking account. You have a gift for story-telling.

I sincerely wish I had the focus to keep such detailed notes of my days on the island! Phenomenal trip report, sounds like you had a pretty good Moosewatch hike. Sadly, the phone loss is a rough spot