10/20/2026
On January 21, 1985, in wind chills approaching a hundred degrees below zero, a small helicopter started herding moose out onto the frozen lakes of Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park.
From the open door of the chopper, a wildlife biologist fired a tranquilizer dart into a running moose's hindquarters. For the next five minutes, the pilot hovered low over the ice, banking and turning to block the drugged animal from wandering back into the thick timber before the sedatives dropped it. Once the moose went down on the snow, a heavier helicopter touched down with a ground crew. They blindfolded the animal, strapped a heavy canvas sling under its belly, and hoisted it into the sky.
Some of those moose flew up to 14 miles dangling underneath a helicopter, swinging above frozen lakes and black spruce forest until they reached a staging area at Mew Lake Campground. On the ground, veterinary crews worked like a pit stop. In roughly ten minutes, each moose was weighed, checked for pregnancy, screened for disease, bolted into a radio-tracking collar, and lowered by crane into a heavy wooden crate.
Loaded onto flatbed trucks, the crated moose rode 600 miles non-stop through Ontario and across the border into Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a 14-to-24-hour haul ending in the deep woods north of Lake Michigamme in Marquette County. Even in sub-zero cold, crowds of locals packed the snowbanks to watch the crates open. Michigan did not pay cash for the Canadian herd; the state traded Ontario a batch of wild turkeys to close the deal.
Twenty-nine moose survived that first 1985 airlift, including 19 cows, at least 18 of which were already carrying calves. Five animals died during the operation, four of them in the opening 48 hours while wildlife vets were still dialing in the tranquilizer doses. A second airlift in 1987 brought in 30 more.
State biologists projected that those 59 founders would build a herd of 1,000 moose across the Upper Peninsula by the year 2000.
For the first twenty years, the math looked solid. The Algonquin cows dropped healthy calves in the Michigan swamps, and between 1997 and 2007, the herd grew by roughly 10 percent every year. Then the growth hit a wall. Between 2009 and 2013, the annual growth rate fell to two percent. Aerial surveys in 2013 tallied 451 moose, less than half the turn-of-the-century target. Two years later, the count was down to 323.
The herd had run right back into the exact biological trap that wiped out Michigan’s native moose a century earlier.
When commercial loggers clear-cut the Upper Peninsula’s old-growth forests in the late 1800s, the brushy new growth brought waves of white-tailed deer north into historic moose range. Those deer carried a microscopic nematode parasite called Parelaphostrongylus tenuis, known as brainworm. Inside a white-tailed deer, the worm causes no harm at all. The deer passes the larvae in its droppings, which are eaten by forest snails and slugs crawling through the wet leaf litter. When a foraging moose accidentally swallows an infected snail on a mouthful of leaves, the worm burrows out of the stomach, travels up the spinal cord, and chews through the moose's brain until the animal walks in circles, goes blind, and dies.
By 1900, logging and brainworm had practically erased moose from the Upper Peninsula. Eighty-five years later, the helicopter airlifts dropped 59 Canadian moose back into woods where white-tailed deer were still shedding the exact same parasite onto the forest floor. Combined with warming winters, heavy winter tick loads, and aging forest cover at the very southern edge of viable moose range, the herd stalled out.
As of 2026, Michigan's entire moose population sits stuck between 400 and 500 animals. In 2025, biologists from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, and Northern Michigan University kicked off a two-year study, capturing and collaring 60 moose to track how many are dying from brainworm, ticks, wolves, and highway traffic.
Forty years after helicopters slung the first moose out of Algonquin Park, DNR moose specialist Chad Stewart summed up the reality on the ground.
"It might not happen in our lifetime, or our children’s, but we have to face the possibility that there might not be a wild moose population in Michigan."
Image is for illustration purposes only.
Source: Algonquin Park Archives / Michigan DNR / Michigan Trail Maps / Michigan Nature Association / Bridge Michigan (2025) / Michigan Public (2026) / Great Lakes Echo (2025)
