Stunning White 'Spirit Moose' Caught on Video. Rare Footage Has Over 2M Views
Moose aren’t exactly the usual animal for teaching kids about colors or noises, but everyone knows that moose are brown. Usually.
They’re brown and make a weird baying sound, right? And they’re huge. Definitely huge.
But sometimes, people spot white moose roaming around. Recently, in Alaska, some people caught footage of a white moose traipsing around nearby.
You might be saying that it’s albino, but you also might be wrong.
There are what’s known as “spirit moose” throughout Alaska and Canada, though they’re incredibly rare to see. In a video posted by I Love Alaska on Facebook, one lucky person got to witness this big guy munching away at some greenery.
It isn’t clear if this guy is one of those spirit moose or albino — we’d need to see his eyes to be sure — but it’s still an incredible sight to see.
According to Ken Marsh, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, “Albino and/or leucistic moose occasionally turn up in Alaska, and there have been several sightings over the years in Interior Alaska, particularly.”
There are roughly 175,000 to 200,000 moose worldwide, and Alaska makes up about a sixth of that population.
Staff at Alaska Garden Bed and Breakfast have a resident white moose who likes to drop by with her totally normal, brown calf occasionally. She prefers to visit in the winter, and they see her much more frequently during that time.
If you look closely, it seems like this particular moose is albino, based on the color of its eyes. That would also explain why her calf is brown, too; albinism is not always passed on.
But spirit moose, largely found in Canada when they’re ever sighted, seem to simply have the gene that controls the color of their fur “turned off,” so to speak.
Some groups of scientists believe the spirit moose is a subspecies of the standard brown moose, similar to the spirit bear, which is a white-coated black bear. That’s quite an oxymoron, isn’t it?
These spirit moose are most commonly found in and around Foleyet, Ontario, in a place known as the White Moose Forest, and are entirely protected from hunting by law.
In Nova Scotia, natives revere the white behemoths, and when a visiting hunter killed one in 2013, they were so upset that the hunters turned the hide over to them and they held a four-day ceremony to honor the spirit animal.
But these white moose aren’t just in North America. They have also appeared in Scandinavia, particularly Sweden. A Norwegian photographer captured incredible footage (above) of one in 2016.
Have you ever heard of these majestic beasts? Is it your new favorite animal? Because it might be mine!
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