For decades, government officials and wildlife experts have believed that moose are not native to Colorado.
and the classify moose in Colorado as historically transient, having never established a stable breeding population before their introduction by the state in the late 1970s.
However, a University of Colorado Boulder provides evidence from newspaper articles, databases, museum collections, photos, journals and Native traditions directly refuting that claim.
“What we found is that we can prove without a shadow of a doubt that moose have been established in Colorado since there is a historic record,” said William Taylor, an anthropology professor and curator of archaeology for the CU Museum of Natural History. “And when you look at the oral tradition record of tribes with deep ties, not just to Colorado but places like northern New Mexico, they have an established presence of moose in stories, in language, in tradition, even in the objects that they make.”
Looking at newspaper and photograph records from public archives across Colorado, Taylor and his team mapped out all evidence they could find of encounters with moose since the record began in the 1850s. What he found was not the occasional moose wandering in from Wyoming, but evidence of a breeding population. The record showed not just young, male moose encounters, but encounters with female moose at nearly the same frequency and regular evidence of juvenile moose.
In total, the review identified more than 30 published occurrences of moose in newspapers between 1860 and 1970, with these mentions often referencing multiple animals or groups. Other documents strongly but indirectly implying the presence of moose were excluded from this tally, such as an 1878 writer inviting his English countrymen to “stalk moose and deer” as they built “fresh homes on the western slopes of the Colorado mountains,” according to a primary source quoted in the study.
Those records give strong reason to suspect that many, if not most, moose encounters during that time went undocumented, according to the study. If moose sightings often failed to reach newspapers and other archives even as late as the mid-1900s, the official record must capture only a fraction of the true abundance of Colorado moose. This evidence shows, according to the study, that moose were present in Colorado long before their 1970s reintroduction, contradicting the idea that such sightings were due to isolated dispersal events.
Taylor also looked at records from archeological sites around Colorado, which uncovered reports of moose at Jurgens, near Greeley, dating back 9,000 years ago. Moose bones have also been identified near Mesa Verde National Park, dating back 1,000 years. This shows the potential presence of moose in Colorado across many millennia, challenging the assumption that they were absent before the 1970s and underscoring the need for further investigation.
The study also looked at published literature from Native nations with traditional ties to Colorado and the Southern Rockies, along with a summary of Northern Arapaho traditional knowledge and connections to moose gathered by coauthor and Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office Director Crystal C’Bearing. C’Bearing is Cheyenne River Sioux and a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe.
Ethnohistories, oral traditions and other Indigenous knowledge sources indicate that moose have a prehistoric and established presence in most of the Native cultures with ancestral connections to the Southern Rockies, according to the study. The traditional knowledge record, including Northern Arapaho language, art, material culture and songs, demonstrates a deep Arapaho connection to moose. In the Arapaho language, the name for moose is hinenihii, which translates to “big man.” The language also has an older word for moose, see’iini3eet, which refers to the moose’s large, flat nose.
The moose is considered a valued commodity among the Northern Arapaho Tribe, C’Bearing said. Societies within the Northern Arapaho utilize many animals, including moose, in their clothing, society items and regalia, a tradition that continues today.
The study’s authors also believe Tribal leaders should be involved in managing moose populations, encouraging Rocky Mountain National Park specifically to lean on Tribal expertise.
“Tribal people were part of the natural ecosystem in terms of hunting and wildlife management,” C’Bearing said in a release. “It would be beneficial not only to the Tribes to utilize the moose again for cultural practices, but to assist in the co-management of moose in Colorado and the Southern Rockies.”
Taylor began looking into moose history in Colorado when Rocky Mountain National Park officials began broadly publicizing . From what he had seen in his work at CU as a curator, he was skeptical about the claim that moose were non-native or invasive. So, he and several colleagues started investigating what the record shows about moose in Colorado.
He felt it was especially important to look into, as the characterization of moose as non-native was impacting the way wildlife experts planned to manage their populations.
“We wanted to see whether the story that was out there was lining up with the facts, because itap clear to me that people’s understanding of the archeological record is shaping the choices that we’re making around managing animals today,” Taylor said. “Moose are these iconic symbols of the Rockies and the West … these are non-trivial issues, the stories that we tell, and they’re clearly shaping the choices people are making.”
There are likely a few reasons as to why people believe moose are not native to Colorado, Taylor said. When he examined the archives from when moose were reintroduced in the 1970s, Taylor said, some people understood this as a reintroduction and restoration effort. But the narrative shifted somewhere along the way, probably because Rocky Mountain National Park was established in the early 1900s when the ecosystems were degraded, but that was the baseline assumption for what the ecology was supposed to be. There also wasn’t an extensive effort to explore the record at the time.
Itap a lot of work and takes a lot of time to comb through all these records, Taylor said, and the assumption that moose are non-native could also be because nobody has ever put the time into this question before.
“The more that we stay curious about what information the past holds rather than kind of waving our hand at it, the better we can design policies and decisions and conservation measures that are going to be effective for the future,” Taylor said.
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