Eight orphaned moose calves growing strong at central Alberta wildlife centre<\/p>\n
Published 1:12 pm Thursday, July 2, 2026<\/p>\n
Eight orphaned moose calves are spending the summer at Medicine River Wildlife Centre until they can be released into the wild this fall.<\/p>\n
Executive director Carol Kelly said normally the centre takes care of three to five calves, and this year it\u2019s just a few more.<\/p>\n
Most of this year\u2019s calves were recovered in the Whitecourt and Fox Creek area after their mothers were killed in vehicle collisions. Two orphans born further north in the Peace River area died within two days of arriving at the Spruce View wildlife centre.<\/p>\n
Kelly said the two calves were very stressed when they arrived and she knew they would not survive.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoose, as big an animal as they are, they\u2019re one of the most easily stressed creatures that we handle. And with a lot of stress, they can die of capture myopathy so we do everything we can to keep that stress down,\u201d Kelly said.<\/p>\n
The surviving calves are thriving in a large, mostly wooded, outdoor enclosure. Human contact is kept to a minimum so they don\u2019t become friendly with people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe goal is when they see us coming, they turn around and run and hide in the forest.\u201d<\/p>\n
The only time they come out to see staff is when a moose mask is worn to simulate a moose mom in order to feed them. Now, most of them are fed from a bottle rack.<\/p>\n
She said most of the calves arrived in late May and it\u2019s unlikely any more will arrive this summer because they would be big and strong enough to evade capture.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe chances of us catching the baby is really slim. They can run. They\u2019re old enough, and wise enough, that they wouldn\u2019t get caught.\u201d<\/p>\n
By now a calf would also know how to eat, and wouldn\u2019t be relying as much on their mother\u2019s milk. But if it happens to meet up with a cow, she\u2019ll take it on, Kelly added.<\/p>\n
Kelly said it will cost about $3,500 for formula to feed the calves. So far about $2,000 has been donated for formula bags that have doubled in cost since the centre first started using them.<\/p>\n
Leafy branches that people have trimmed from their yards are also being donated to feed them so the calves don\u2019t strip all the trees in their enclosure.<\/p>\n
She said unlike deer, it\u2019s difficult to find a mama moose to adopt orphans because moose roam such a wide area.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we do is we wean them off their milk by the first part of September. By mid to late-September, we start getting moose gathering on our property during the rut season. At that point, we open the door and let the moose join up with the adults.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast winter we had two little females, and they hooked up with a cow that didn\u2019t have any babies and we saw them all winter together,\u201d said Kelly, who once recalled seeing a young bull they released mingling with about five big bulls.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was hanging out with the boys,\u201d she chuckled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eight orphaned moose calves growing strong at central Alberta wildlife centre Published 1:12 pm Thursday, July 2, 2026…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":["post-779649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}