No luck with baby moose, mom reunion but efforts continue
Wildlife organization hoping to reunite moose with mother but may give calf to another moose
There was no sign of Mama Moose Wednesday evening after a wildlife rescue team tried to reunite mother and baby.
The calf, just several days old, was found wandering around Royal Oak on Tuesday and was captured by police and city animal services when there was no sign of its mother.
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Staff from the Medicine River Wildlife Centre brought the baby back to a residence in Bearspaw, just west of Calgary, where it was last believed to have been spotted with its mother and attempted to lure the mother back by playing recorded calf distress calls.
However, the mother was nowhere to be found and the calf is being brought back to Cochrane to spend the night safe and warm in one of the centre's facilities.
Staff will return Thursday morning for one last try at reuniting the pair.
Foster moose a possibility
If the mother still doesn't show, staff will bring the calf back to the centre's main facility near Innisfail and will then be part of a research project where they foster it with an adult moose at the centre.
Kathleen Mahoney, from whose property rescue staff are playing the distress calls, says she noticed a young moose and her calf outside her home a couple of days ago. She says the moose returned later without her calf.
"We were just working away here and looked out the window and saw a mother with a brand new baby moose. A few hours later, the mom came back without the baby and we sort of had a conversation about that, wondering if maybe she lost her baby. The next day, she came back and hung around the yard the whole day, looking kind of different. She just would stand and not move and we thought, maybe she did lose the baby," said Mahoney.
"The little one was trying to nurse and she wasn't having much of it ... it looked like a young moose, and then when she came back [without the calf] she just stood there, which isn't normal."
When she heard about the lone calf on CBC Radio, Mahoney says it clicked that this might be the same moose.
She had also taken pictures of the calf in her yard and says it looks like the same calf found in Royal Oak.
