![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Kathy-Crowley-moose-092326.jpg\")
<\/p>\nA moose made quite the tour through Gardner, Massachusetts, on Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
The animal popped up in a neighborhood, crossing busy roads and giving at least one driver a very close encounter.<\/p>\n
One of the earliest sightings came around 8:15 a.m., when Gardner resident Nancy Nadeau got an unexpected alert from her Blink camera.<\/p>\n
“It said there’s a moose walking in your driveway and I literally did not believe that,” Nadeau said. “I just went, ‘sure,’ you know what I mean?”<\/p>\n
But the camera was right.<\/p>\n
Video from Nadeau’s home shows the moose walking through her driveway. Nadeau said it towered over her Chevrolet Equinox.<\/p>\n
“That’s a big boy,” she said. “I would say at least 6 feet, if not more.”<\/p>\n
The moose didn’t stick around for long. When a group of children began walking toward the bus stop, the animal took off in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n
“An animal that size with little kids is probably not a good situation, but luckily, the moose just was like, ‘Nope, I want no part of them. I’m out,'” Nadeau said.<\/p>\n
Gardner police said they started receiving calls about the moose around 8:50 a.m. as it wandered near the Main Street area.<\/p>\n
It kept moving from there.<\/p>\n
Another video captured the moose near Meineke, walking across the road as drivers watched from their cars.<\/p>\n
The animal eventually made its way downtown, where Gardner resident Kathy Crowley was waiting in her car outside her eye doctor’s office when it walked right past her driver’s side window.<\/p>\n
“I could have touched him. I could have reached my hand out and touched him. That’s how close he was,” Crowley said.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tKathy CrowleyKathy Crowley<\/p>\n
She said the moose’s shoulder was roughly level with the top of her car. And Crowley thought the animal may have noticed her, too.<\/p>\n
“In the video, it looks like he gives me a little bit of a side eye,” Crowley said. “He knew I was there, for sure.”<\/p>\n
Crowley said what the video does not show is a police officer following close behind the moose.<\/p>\n
Police said officers were sent to the area to keep people a safe distance away and used their emergency lights to warn drivers.<\/p>\n
According to Gardner Police Chief Eric McAvene, the moose eventually made its way toward Route 2, crossed over and returned to city streets in the area of Timpany Boulevard, or Route 68.<\/p>\n
Police said the moose was also spotted near McDonald’s and in some backyards before eventually heading back into the woods. Officers have not seen it since.<\/p>\n
During encounters like this, police said officers generally keep their distance and try to loosely guide the animal toward a wooded area.<\/p>\n
Residents should do the same.<\/p>\n
“Private citizens should leave the animals alone,” McAvene said. “They will most likely move on naturally. Most incidents escalate when people try to get close to take pictures.”<\/p>\n
And while seeing a moose wandering through downtown might seem unusual, Gardner police said calls involving moose and bears in residential areas are not uncommon.<\/p>\n
For Crowley, the unlikely encounter came with some irony. She said she spends her summers in Maine and has never spotted a moose there.<\/p>\n
“I go to Maine for the summer, and I’ve never seen a moose up there,” Crowley said. “But I see one in a parking lot in Gardner, so life is strange.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A moose made quite the tour through Gardner, Massachusetts, on Tuesday morning. The animal popped up in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61287,72434,61,60,15863,82,263],"class_list":["post-634339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animals-and-wildlife","tag-gardner","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-massachusetts","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}