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Marty the moose caught the eye of political insiders and reporters alike during his 48 hour stint in D.C. It turns out he makes the pilgrimage every year from his home at the White Mountains Visitor Center, where he’s a crowd pleaser with visitors.
And it’s easy to see why - he’s extremely striking, at over eight (!) feet tall.
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Marty is not a real moose, although the plush rendering was real-looking enough that some Washington observers assumed he was taxidermied.
Charyl Reardon of the White Mountains Visitor Center said that in real life some moose get even bigger than that, which is pretty incredible.
I’ve been following all the distressing reports about how moose populations are struggling and succumbing to growing tick populations, so I asked Reardon if it’s still realistic to expect to see moose in New Hampshire.
She said there are three tour companies that take people out to see them, and they see moose around 90 percent of the time! But keep in mind that they go at night, when the massive animals are more active.
“You still see them especially quite a bit toward the northern part of New Hampshire,” Reardon assured me.
New Hampshire’s moose population is around 3,300, and they live throughout the state, according to Fish and Game, although there are more moose in the northern part of the state and very, very few in the southernmost part of the state.
Every year, there’s a nine-day moose hunt in New Hampshire. This year the hunt is scheduled for Oct. 21-29, and hunters are required to have a permit. People who want to participate have to enter a lottery (it’s already closed for this year). Tickets are hard to come by: New Hampshire residents have a 1 in 96 chance of winning one, and out-of-staters have a 1 in 410 chance.
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Unregulated hunting and deforestation caused the moose population to dwindle to just 50 animals in 1950. The moose hunt has been an annual event since 1988, when the moose population had climbed to around 1,600. The population reached its peak in the mid 1990s, when there were 7,000 to 8,000 moose on the loose in New Hampshire. Since then, the population has declined by more than 50 percent.
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Amanda Gokee can be reached at amanda.gokee@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @amanda_gokee.