‘No training manual’: New York rescuers save moose stuck in frozen lake

NEW YORK - So what do you do if you find a 450kg moose stuck in a partly frozen lake in the centre of a 2.4 million ha wilderness?

When rescuers arrived at Lake Abanakee in northern New York state, only the head of the moose was above the water. It had fallen through about 40 minutes earlier, and was spotted by an unidentified bystander in the vast forests of the Adirondacks.

The moose, a male that had shed his antlers, had walked about 60m onto the lake in Indian Lake, about 160km north-west of Albany, before falling into the frigid waters late on the morning of Jan 16, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The rescuers saw that the moose was unable to get out of the water. An airboat, a flat-bottomed watercraft with a propeller, was on its way to help.

“I guess there’s no training manual for getting moose out of the ice,” Lieutenant Robert Higgins, a state environmental conservation officer, said with a chuckle later in an interview posted on the agency’s website.

He narrated the rescue like it was all in a day’s work, as if anyone would quickly dress in cold-water gear and venture onto a frozen lake with sleds and heavy chainsaws, as the team had done.

Mr Evan Nahor, a forest ranger, said in the interview: “We knew that time wasn’t on our side. It was, ‘Do what we can with what we have.’”

The airboat had not yet arrived, so the rescuers walked onto the ice, using a spud bar – a long, metal tool with a chisel on one end – to find the most solid path to the moose.

“Every minute counts,” Lt Higgins said of the rescue.

They were not worried, they said, about needing to be saved themselves if they fell through. Their dry suits would keep them warm and afloat, and their safety ropes would be used to pull one another out.

Kneeling on sleds – to spread out their weight across the ice – they used a chainsaw to remove sections of ice and pushed them away to open a channel to the shore.

The video shows the crew attacking the ice surrounding the moose as it calmly treaded water – maybe a little too calmly.

Forest ranger Matt Savarie said: “We tried poking it with a couple of different things, but it didn’t seem afraid of them. So, finally, we pushed the jet sleds that we had up close to it. And for whatever reason, it was scared of those. So once we got behind it, we were able to direct it.”

The bull moose, which can weigh around 450kg, addled briskly through the narrow channel and made it to shore. By then, it had been in the water for about two hours.

Lt Higgins said: “It was really tired. It was shivering. It just didn’t have much energy left. We didn’t know if it was going to be able to stand up or not.”

It took about 15 minutes for the moose to find its footing and strength. “It tried a few times and eventually it stood up,” he said.

Then the moose shook off the ice and took an easy stride on a different path, into the forest. NYTIMES