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A Manitoba hunter says he can sleep easy knowing he helped rescue a moose that fell into an icy river in Nopiming Provincial Park earlier this week.
Russ Popp, 65, said he got a call around noon Tuesday from a friend who spotted the moose at Bird River while leaving the park, which is about 155 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.
“She says to me, ‘I saw a moose standing in a bush, looking at another moose on the ice — or it fell through the ice — I’m not sure what I’m seeing,'” Popp, an avid hunter and a retired big game outfitter, told CBC News on Thursday.
“Me and my wife, we go down there [and] sure enough, there’s a moose in the ice, and it can’t get out.”
The moose was exhausted, floating deep in the water with its head resting on the ice, Popp said. He knew he wanted to at least try to get it out, he said.
“I’m not too sure how, so I phone Manitoba Conservation and … I said, ‘Listen, this is the deal: we got a moose, and we’re going to try and save it.'”
Full-grown moose can weigh roughly 1,000 pounds, Parks Canada says.
Popp said the ice on Bird River is notoriously thin, as beavers and otters are “very active” in the water.
“Now, I’ve got a real situation here because I’ve been out here since 1966, [and] I religiously would never, never go on that ice there.”
Three conservation officials came to help Popp try to rescue the moose, he said.
“The moose — as we were trying to put a rope around it and pull it out — was fighting us. It was a very dangerous situation,” he said. “We really didn’t know if we were going to get that moose out, to be really honest with you.”
Popp says the moose ran into the bush after the rescue, but he’s unsure whether it survived. (Russ Popp)
The group spent nearly three hours tugging on the animal, and chipping the ice around it, to try to get it to land, he said.
“Of course, the moose is fighting against us. It doesn’t want to come towards us. But it is trusting us in a way that it’s not getting out of our way either, to chip the ice.”
The group was able to get the moose out of the water after adjusting the rope, Popp said.
“We finally got behind the moose, and we got it out, and it was free,” he said.
“It got up on its feet and ran into the bush.”
‘Total honour’
The moose showed signs of hypothermia and was missing chunks of fur due to ticks, Popp said. He’s unsure whether it survived.
“I’m not going to say it’s a guaranteed thing [that] it survived,” he said. “We don’t know, but we had to give it a chance.”
Moose in that region are struggling in the face of predators such as wolves, ticks and brainworms, as well as habitat loss after last year’s devastating wildfire season, Popp said.
He said he hasn’t hunted for moose in the area for more than two decades.
“We do want the moose to come back,” Popp said. “Most people think hunters are just killers, but we are conservation people.”
Popp called it a “total honour” to help get the moose out of the water, saying he couldn’t have gone to bed knowing it was still there.
“I said to myself, ‘I’m glad I lived long enough to be able to do this,'” he said.
“If you can help somebody, that’s your reward, and there’s no better reward.”