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CU Boulder archaeologist William Taylor and research colleagues find evidence that far from being non-native, moose have been in the southern Rockies for centuries, likely longer

The modern Colorado moose is often considered just that: modern—brought to the state by wildlife officials in the late 1970s, preceded by very occasional reports of moose sightings in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Since being translocated to Colorado, these charismatic megafauna have been a source of both fascination and concern. In Rocky Mountain National Park, where moose populations have thrived, ecosystems have been changing, and moose-associated impacts have sparked renewed conversations about managing an animal labeled “non-native.”

However, by an interdisciplinary team of scientists, archivists and Tribal cultural heritage leaders shows that the “non-native” label is inaccurate. They present evidence demonstrating that moose have been in Colorado for at least centuries and likely longer.��

CU Boulder scholar William Taylor and his research colleagues found evidence that moose have lived in the southern Rockies for centuries.

The researchers analyzed newspaper archives, archaeological site reports, scientific journals, museum collections and photo archives to understand where and when moose were present in Colorado prior to the mid-1900s. Perhaps most importantly, notes lead author William Taylor, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of anthropology and CU Museum curator of archaeology, the scholars sought Indigenous histories, and in doing so found evidence of moose being well known and deeply integrated into traditional knowledge of Native people in the southern Rockies.

Crystal C’Bearing, a study co-author and Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, notes that among the Northern Arapaho, "the moose is considered a valued commodity among the Tribe.” She adds that societies within the Northern Arapaho "utilize many animals, including moose, in their clothing, society items and regalia. This tradition continues today."

The scholarly approach of joining Indigenous knowledge with historical accounts, archaeology and paleontology, "shows the power of multiple independent lines of evidence converging on the conclusion that moose were part of southern Rocky Mountain ecosystems long before modern reintroductions," says study co-author Jonathan Dombrosky of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and the University of Alabama. "More broadly, the study demonstrates how historical sciences can help us better understand the origins of modern ecosystems and make more informed decisions about their future."��

Delving into the archaeological record

The seeds for this research and the approach to it grew from Taylor’s deep dive into the CU Museum’s collections when he arrived in 2019.

“One of the things I’ve done with my time here is try to familiarize myself with and understand our own collections, which are among the more significant archaeological collections in the whole region,” Taylor says. “In the process of curating our collections, I became more and more familiar with what’s in those and the publications that are out there in the world that pertain to them.��

“One of the oldest and most significant is the which is from a site in Colorado and related to a really early, deep chapter of Colorado’s pre-history, and that collection was analyzed by (one of) my predecessor(s), Dr. Joe Ben Wheat. He analyzed this collection decades ago and identified several specimens of moose in northwest Colorado dating back thousands of years, to the early Holocene.”

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Arapaho objects, symbols and designs linked to moose. 1) Moose hide drum; 2-4) Track designs; 5) Ear design; 6-8) Leg and hoof designs; 9) Animal design (Moose, wolf, or elk). Images modified from Kroeber (1983). (Image courtesy Journey LeBeau)

That fact was on Taylor’s mind a few years ago when Rocky Mountain National Park officials began broadly publicizing moose management issues and the discussions that were happening about them. In many of those discussions, Taylor recalls, the messaging frequently labeled moose as “invasive,” “non-native” or “outsiders,” which doesn’t align with the archaeological record and “some of the basic facts I know from my role here working as curator,” he says.

“I also started to see some media narratives, based on secondhand accounts, suggesting that Native people in the Rockies didn’t know about moose. Things like that just started to rub me the wrong way and raised my spidey senses —I decided that there needs to be serious engagement with the archaeological record. We needed to take a closer look at these things that are trickling into the discourse—particularly characterizations of Indigenous perspectives and the historic record, because that’s going to shape what happens to moose in the future.”

Taylor contacted Tribal partners and colleagues at other universities and institutions and asked, “What’s your sense of the story of moose in the southern Rockies?” From those conversations, he proposed a rigorous analysis of the history of the moose in this area.

The work began in the archives of the CU Museum, and drew on the expertise of other museum staff. They delved into Colorado’s approximately 160 years of digitized newspapers—“an extraordinary resource,” Taylor says—mapping each documented sighting of a moose, every record of an interaction with a moose they encountered for the past 160 years. The story that emerged was a rich record showing that moose have been in this area from its earliest colonial settlement days.

Seeking Indigenous histories

The more challenging task was crawling through Colorado’s sprawling archaeological record. “Like many western states and many parts of the world, the archaeological record isn’t a neatly organized database,” Taylor explains. "It's often a chaotic compilation of dusty old books, partially published white papers, just a lot of resources kind of floating around out there, so you have to turn over a lot of rocks to find what you need.”

This meant sending rafts of emails, requesting interlibrary loans of undigitized manuscripts and working professional and personal networks to better understand the archaeological record. They dug into municipal photo archives along the Front Range and museum databases for vertebrate zoology collections. From this research, they wove a rich tapestry of findings showing that “even though it’s very, very hard to get a comprehensive picture of when an animal was or wasn’t in a given place at a given time in the ancient world, when you take this multi-methodological approach and really get curious rather than starting from assumptions, you uncover a really fascinating picture,” Taylor says.

One of the most exciting aspects of the research, Taylor adds, was pairing this work with Indigenous histories, including oral traditions about moose from across the region. One of Taylor’s colleagues shared a 19th-century record from the Jicarilla Apache of northern New Mexico discussing the fact that moose were present in—and had recently disappeared from—even the southernmost ranges of the southern Rocky Mountains.

Ultimately, the research coalesced into a reframing of moose in the southern Rockies, supported by evidence: Moose are not, in fact, newcomers, but longtime residents.

Supporting future management

So, what does this mean for human-wildlife co-existence and for populations and ecosystems increasingly stressed by climate change? The findings don’t mean that changes to mountain ecosystems should be ignored, Taylor and his colleagues emphasize. Instead, they argue that moose impacts should be understood through a deeper ecological and historical view, especially in national parks where many processes that once shaped large herbivore populations have been altered.

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Moose calves in the Colorado mountains.

“Rocky Mountain National Park is dealing with ecological impacts from moose, but treating moose as a non-native species changes which management responses seem justified," says study co-author John Wendt of New Mexico State University, noting that large mammals and the landscapes they inhabit have never been static, and large herbivores like moose have historically been controlled by things like predators, habitat change and human hunting.��

"When modern park systems operate without these regulating processes, high impacts don't necessarily mean that an animal is ecologically out of place,” Wendt adds, Instead, "they may be a sign that our management frameworks themselves should be reconsidered."

The study’s results may change how wildlife managers think about managing modern ecosystems, which have been destabilized by major changes in the last two centuries, including the removal of natural predators, the researchers note. C'Bearing says that Tribes may be willing partners in solving this issue: "Tribal people were part of the natural ecosystem in terms of hunting and wildlife management. 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."

Further, the multidisciplinary approach that the researchers used can be applied to other species, Taylor says. Better understanding where animals lived in the past, and for how long they lived there, can offer important clues to supporting their futures.

"The veil of time is often our biggest obstacle in understanding wildlife," said Joshua Miller, a study co-author from the University of Cincinnati. "Compared to the thousands of years that a species can live in a particular place, data from wildlife surveys might only extend a few decades into the past. We can learn a lot from those data, but some questions require more expansive time horizons. Weaving together different threads of historical evidence can fill important knowledge gaps,��and help us��develop strategies for managing and conserving plants and animals from around the world."

Study authors are William T. T. Taylor,��John A. F. Wendt,��Jonathan Dombrosky,��Crystal C'Bearing,��Mikayla Costales,��Isaac A. Hart,��Journey LeBeau,��Adrian Johnson,��Elena Lompe,��Russell W. Graham,��Chance Ward,��Emily Lena Jones and��Joshua H. Miller.

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