Catherine Rusoff
An Alaska man and two police officers saved a moose calf from what police described as “certain death” after it fell into a lake and became trapped in a narrow space between a seaplane and a dock. The dramatic rescue was captured on video.
Spencer Warrenwho works for the outdoor tourism company Destination Alaska Adventure Co., arrived at work around 6:30 a.m. Friday to prepare a seaplane for the day’s trip when she heard what she considered to be a strange-sounding bird.
He quickly spotted the elk calf wedged between the plane’s floats and the dock on Beluga Lake in Homer, a community on the Kenai Peninsula about 220 miles south of Anchorage. Floats replace a plane’s wheels, allowing it to take off and land on water.
He immediately thought, “Oh, man, where is Mommy? I know she’s close by,” before spotting the worried mother about five feet away with another calf. The mother moose can be dangerously protective of her calves – a photographer was killed by a mother moose protecting her cubs last month in Homer.
Spencer Warren-AP
The elk calf tried to climb out of the lake but was unable to step onto the top of the metal buoy with its hooves. His cautious mother was keeping Warren, the supposed savior, from getting too close as he fought.
“It’s like an ice rink for the moose and its hooves,” Warren said of Friday’s rescue. “Then he kept slipping and sliding and couldn’t get up.”
Warren contacted his boss, who called Homer police.
An officer eventually positioned his police cruiser between the mother moose and the seaplane to allow another officer and Warren to rescue the calf, Homer police Lt. Ryan Browning told the Associated Press.
The calf had one leg extended on top of the plane’s buoy, where it became trapped.
“You know, luckily he wasn’t moving, which made the rescue a little easier,” Warren said. “We just lifted it and put it on the dock there.”
The exhausted calf lay sprawled on the boardwalk until a police officer helped him to his feet. The calf was reunited with its mother and she licked the water off her body – all of this caught on camera by Warren.
“Anytime you can rescue a little creature, it makes you feel good,” Browning said.
Homer Police Department posted Warren’s video of the dramatic rescue on Facebook.
“Sometimes you really manage to do something important in life,” the police department wrote. “Hats off to Officers Morgan Tracy and Charles Lee who helped rescue a moose calf from certain death this morning.”
According to Alaska Department of Fish and Game, there are an estimated 175,000 to 200,000 elk statewide. In the wild, elk rarely live longer than 16 years.
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