New England is one of the most beautiful parts of North America.

We're blessed with mountains, a sea coast, diverse woodlands and abundant wildlife.

So there's a lot to take advantage of in the natural world around us.

But it seems there's never quite enough time to just sit back, relax and enjoy its beauty.

Well, that's about to change.

Welcome to Windows to the Wild.

I'm Willem Lange.

We're presenting a series of programs that record the beauty, diversity and character of New England's natural world.

In the next half hour, we'll treat you to a slice of that natural world as we tag along with a modern day moose whisperer.

Charles Willy is a wildlife photographer and former fish and game biologist who grew up in the great North Woods around Colebrook, where he's been tracking and studying Moose his whole life.

He's good at it.

He even manages on occasion to become accepted as part of the herd and witnesses moose behavior most people will never see.

So we gave him a video camera and sent him into the woods in search of the wild moose.

This is excelent moose habitat.

It’s a mixture of soft wood and hard wood that provides cover.

Moose are absolutely fascinating creatures, and I enjoy them year round.

I photograph them as long as I can throughout the year.

The only thing that stops me in the late fall is when the snow depths get so high that it's they just can't possibly get around again.

But the interactions I have with Moose are just incredibly important to me.

I try to be sort of one with the moose population and try to be as patient as possible.

And I find that that's a very important quality in terms of getting the kind of photography that I do.

The bull’s can tell, the size of the bull by the resonance from the antlers.

A bigger bull is more apt to respond to a large antler the smaller bulls to small antlers.

And it’s a sound on a still morning that can carry for a mile or more.

I'm trying to think like the moose in many ways move like the moose very slowly.

They actually spend a lot of time standing still and and looking around.

They're either feeding or standing or bedding.

Sometimes it can be very tiring because they don't move, but eventually they will move.

And during the times that they do move, then you're apt to capture some, able to capture some images you otherwise couldn't get.

This tree has more resonance to it.

What an incredible lucky find.

I think they're more than 3 and they're only about 50 feet away.

I’m I’m remaining perfectly motionless and they're accepting me.

and I'm completely in the open for them to see I heard them from a distance.

I just heard a slight clank of antlers now the breeze is coming behind me.

I don't know if it's gonna spoil this opportunity or not.

They may accept seeing me, but they may not accept the human smell.

There’s a large bull watching me.

This might be three and a half.

he's a nice bull but as you can see he's browsing off the top of this soft glen.

Ethics are an important consideration when you're photographing any animal that certainly comes into play when you're photographing moose.

The whole intent is not to disrupt the animal from what its normal activity might be because the behaviors that are most rewarding and mean the most to me, those behaviors where they just go about the normal business of of browsing or being close to one another, bulls and cows and sharing and intimacy.

That's that's almost human like.

And, and it could be embarrassing at times.

That yearling bull is looking at me.

I’m trying to remain steady so he doesn't panic.

Perhaps he'll make me out as a vertical stump.

If you rush the opportunity and push forward on Moose whatever they might be doing at the time, the natural reaction is to move away.

You have to be as quiet as possible, moving slowly as possible, appear to be disinterested in them, and it's produced great benefits for me.

I've been able to walk in amongst a group of bulls and have actually been within 50 yards of three bulls, three pairs of bulls that were actually all sparring at the same time.

And they pretty much ignored me and it was an absolute rare treat.

So whereas a lot of people, when they encounter moose in the woods, particularly hunters that encounter moose bulls more often, they tend to give them a wide berth and with good reason, because sometimes the bulls can be aggressive.

But if you're very calm move forward slowly actually talk to the moose, I talk to them.

I, I sing to them softly in a soft voice.

Makes a really big difference in lowering their fear, He’s bedding down.

It’s cold so you can see their breath.

But I have yet to have a moose fail to stop regardless of how aggressive it was and the way to make the moose stop is to raise the hand above the head and shout at the moose, hold it or any loud command.

Now, whether it's the notion that raising the hand above the head is a trick that they can't compete with or not, I don't know, but it certainly is effective.

When I was walking along this trail a couple of weeks ago, I found this moose skeleton, and there's a lot we can tell from what's been left here.

It's obvious that coyotes, more than likely, perhaps foxes and maybe Fisher have cleaned off what moose, what meat there was.

But you can see from the pink ness in this, some cartilage on the femur bone that that it was a death that occurred some time this spring or during the winter.

What we can tell from what we have is that it's a cow moose.

For one thing, there are no pedestals as it would be if it was a bull.

We have the jawbone, and the jawbone tells us the age of the moose.

It was a four year old moose when it died, and that's told by tooth wear and tooth replacement.

And this is the scapula bone, the shoulder blade, and this is apparently the femur bone.

And by breaking the femur bone, we'll get an idea of the nutritional condition of the moose when it died.

Now I'm going to turn my face to the side.

If it's a moose that was in good nutritional shape, the bone will be very hard.

It'll be very difficult to break.

If it was in poor nutrition, it will break fairly easily.

Then we can look at the bone marrow inside the bone marrow is all withered up and I'm not able to tell what I was hoping I was able to tell, but obviously it couldn't have been in very good nutritional shape or there would have been a lot of fat inside.

The fact that it's is light colored as it is may mean that not only was it in poor shape nutritionally, it was anemic as well.

So this may have been simply a winter mortality from a moose that was in in poor condition.

Now, that poor condition could have been brought on by tick loads because moose may carry 50,000 or 100,000 ticks on their body that just drained their blood and reduce their vitality.

And some of them end up dying because of it.

This is apparently a moose swallow.

It's used more extensively during the summer months.

The moose water wade out into the middle of it and roll in the mud, covering themselves with as much mud as possible, or at least a thin layer of it.

And that provides them with protection from biting insects.

You can see some of the large tracks where probably a big bull has waded through the middle of it.

Just recently, the breeding season for Moose is referred to as the rut, and during the time of the rut, the cows come into heat and they're bred by bulls and the bulls may wander looking for cows and sometimes the cows will actually give out a lot of whales trying to attract the bulls.

And there are a variety of ways that they leave scents that attract one another, one is the cows may rub off some bark on some young saplings and then rub their necks and their face and so forth against it and leave some of the the oils and pheromones that are in their system.

And the bulls, of course, will dig pits.

They urinate into those pits and then wallow in it.

If the cows find the pits, they may actually wallow in the pits themselves and cover themselves with all of these pheromones.

And it's speculated at least, that this may bring them a little closer to estrus and breeding condition.

This is the pit we were looking for.

It rained yesterday and as a result it has cut down on the odor substantially and the moose hasn't freshened it up.

This morning.

These pits may be a foot deep, they may be two feet deep, but the bull will certainly be back and he'll urinate in it again and roll in it and try to become caked with with his own urine and mud and then stroll through the woods.

And they can be pretty rank animals.

They have an incredible scent capability, obviously far more than we do.

So they would probably be able to smell a bull like that depending on how the breeze was 100 yards away or hundreds of yards away.

This is a what once was a real bog.

It's drying up, obviously, but it provides a place for moose to bed down, particularly during the summer months when the grasses are green, succulent and higher, and moose are really designed with a very heavy inner coat and long hairs.

They're designed for cold weather and they overheat very easily.

And these wetland areas provide a place for them to cool.

And apparently it's an even if they're standing some standing water here, they'll still bed down in it.

And the this is a bed of a smaller moose obviously, and a larger moose here.

It's possible that it was a cow and calf a couple of months earlier there were two very large bulls bedded down in this wetland that I surprised when I came up to the edge of it.

They moved off into the softwood.

Their antlers were still in the velvet, but from the size of the antlers and the size of the moose themselves, they were pretty impressive animals.

This beaver pond is a very important body of water to a variety of wildlife species, including moose, deer, bears.

Perhaps otter as they come up through minke, then there can be an abundance of wildlife activity here.

If one has the patience to sit in a blind and wait during the course of the day, I'm sure you could see most of those species.

There are a variety of trails that come in here, put down by moose and by deer.

And it's sort of like wagon spokes that come from all directions.

This just becomes a a nucleus of wildlife activity.

It could be 50 years old.

It could be a hundred years old.

It's at the head end of the flowage so there are no major streams that come into it that could wash it out with high water.

And it provides a source of water for moose and it becomes a focal point in the area for moose because the it may be the best source of water where they can drink copious amounts for a mile or more in each direction.

The beaver pond is important to the moose because of the succulent vegetation that grows within it.

Moose need to have a balance of potassium and sodium in their diet, and the terrestrial plants have a very high level of potassium, but not a high level of sodium.

And in order to get that balance, moose move into wetland areas, they may be ponds and look for succulent vegetation because this succulent vegetation has salt levels that are 4 to 10 times higher than what they are in the terrestrial vegetation.

So it provides a kind of balance that they need.

It also provides some micro nutrients.

As you can see, the moose have been feeding, consuming a little bit of the mud in here and the copious amount of tracks indicate that it's it's a pretty busy place and it's likely that there are some some salts or some micronutrients in that soil that we don't know about.

But the moose do.

These are a couple of softwood trees that have been rubbed by bulls.

They may have done it to get rid of the velvet.

Also, they may have done it to try to shed their antlers because the after the rut, when the blood supply starts is shut down to the antlers.

They become itchy near the pedestals, where they’re attached, and they bother the moose so the moose start rubbing their antlers on the trees.

Eventually the antlers drop off, but in the process they can end up doing considerable damage to the trees that that they've rubbed against.

In this case, one can see that they've killed both of these softwood trees.

Admittedly, they're not very large trees.

One's about six inches and the other is about eight inches.

But nevertheless, if they circle around it enough, they can kill all that growth.

Young growth in the tree.

I've been photographing Moose rather intensively for approximately 15 years, spend a considerable amount of time in the higher elevations during the fall, during the months of September, October and November.

And during that time period, I've had a variety of interactions with Moose, some extremely pleasant and others not so.

I've had a cow that was intent on killing me, whether it was partly affected by brain worm or not, I don't know.

I also had a bull that charged me that was a younger bull.

And in fact the younger bulls are the ones that pose the greatest risk.

The adult bulls apparently are familiar enough with humans, so and they've they've gained enough knowledge over the years so that they know that humans are to be avoided.

Young bulls on the other hand, are sort of like teen agers and they think they know just about all there is to know.

And it's the young bulls that can turn quite aggressive.

You couldn't possibly outrun one.

Probably the if you had a bull that was harassing you.

The easiest thing is to try to get a tree between you and the bull and walk away from it.

I keep coming back for more, but it's a lot of work.

But I love it.

Well, it's time to say goodbye.

But first I'd like to thank Charles Willy for taking us into his world and sharing with us his passion for the wild moose.

And thank you for joining us.

If you have any ideas for new adventures that you think we should explore, please let us hear from you.

I'm Willem Lange and I hope to see you again.

on Windows to the Wild.