Alaska’s Anchorage A man from Alaska and two police officers saved a baby moose that had fallen into a lake and become stuck between a floatplane and a dock. The police said the moose was “sure to die.”
Spencer Warren works for Destination Alaska Adventure Co., an outdoor tourist company. He got to work Friday at 6:30 a.m. to get a floatplane ready for the day’s trip when he heard what he thought was a strange bird sound.
He quickly saw the moose calf stuck between the plane’s floats and the dock at Beluga Lake in Homer, which is on the Kenai Peninsula and is about 220 miles (350 km) south of Anchorage. With the floats instead of wheels, the plane can take off and rest on water.
Right away, he asked himself, “Oh, man, where is mama?” “I know she’s close,” he said, then saw the worried mother with another calf about 4 feet (1.2 meters) away. Mother moose can be very protective of their babies. In Homer last month, a photographer was killed by a mother moose who was guarding her young.
The young moose tried to get out of the water, but its feet wouldn’t let it get on top of the metal float. Warren wanted to help, but its wary mother stopped him from getting too close as it struggled.
Warren said of the rescue on Friday, “It’s like an ice rink for the moose and its hooves.” “He kept falling and couldn’t get up.”
He asked his boss about things, and the boss called the Homer police.
A Homer Police Lt. Ryan Browning told The Associated Press that one officer finally put his cruiser between the mother moose and the floatplane so that another officer and Warren could save the calf.
One leg of the calf was stretched out across the top of the plane’s float and got stuck there.
“Thank goodness he wasn’t moving, because that made it a little easier to save him,” Warren said. “We just took him out of the water and put him on that dock.”
The tired calf was lying on the pier until a police officer helped it stand up. Warren took a picture of the mother calf licking the water off the baby’s body when they got back together.
As Browning put it, “saving a little animal always makes you feel good.”
