An Alaskan man and two police officers saved a baby moose from what police described as a “certain disappearance” after it fell into a lake and got stuck in a narrow space between a seaplane and a dock. The dramatic rescue was caught on video.
Spencer Warren, who works for outdoor tourism company Destination Alaska Adventure Co., had arrived at work around 6:30 a.m. Friday to prepare a seaplane for the day's trip when she heard what I thought was a strange sounding bird.
He quickly spotted the moose calf wedged between the plane's floats and the Beluga Lake dock in Homer, a community on the Kenai Peninsula about 220 miles south of Anchorage. Floats replace the wheels of an airplane, allowing it to take off and land on water.
He immediately thought, “Oh man, where's mom? I know she's close,” before seeing the worried mom about 4 feet away with another calf. Mother moose can be dangerously protective of her calves – a The photographer was killed by a mother moose protecting her brood last month in Homer.
Spencer Warren / AP
The baby moose tried to get out of the lake, but couldn't get on top of the metal float with its hooves. Her wary mother kept Warren, the would-be rescuer, from getting too close while she struggled.
“It's like an ice rink for the moose and their hooves,” Warren said of Friday's rescue. “So he just kept slipping and sliding and couldn't get up.”
Warren checked in with her boss, who called the Homer police.
An officer eventually placed 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 float, where it was attached.
“You know, luckily, he wasn't moving so that made the rescue a little bit easier,” Warren said. “We just lifted it straight up and put it on the dock.”
The exhausted calf lay sprawled on the boardwalk until an officer helped him. The calf was reunited with its mother and she licked the water off its body, all caught on camera by Warren.
“Anytime you can rescue a little creature, it always makes you feel good,” Browning said.
The Homer Police Department posted Warren's video of the dramatic rescue on Facebook.
“Sometimes you really can 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 the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, there are between 175,000 and 200,000 moose statewide. In the wild, moose rarely live more than 16 years.
