Lee Kantar is the moose biologist for Maine and has been with the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife since 2005. In 2019, Lee was award with the Distinguished Moose Biologist Award at the North American Moose Conference and Workshop. Lee’s work is featured in an upcoming film called Guardian of the Giants by HuntingME which is scheduled to be released this summer. When not monitoring Maine’s most beloved megafauna, Lee is often hiking with his family, enjoying Maine’s wildlife, and preparing for the next hunt.
I grew up in New Hampshire, though most people would say I still haven’t grown up. I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a different generation now – I have daughters, and they don’t get to wander like I did. My parents had a woodlot in Henniker, and we used to help with the wood. When we got into dad’s hair too much, he sent us down the hill to wander in the woods. I spent a lot of time looking at vernal pools for salamanders. I didn’t know the names of species then, but you realize later how important that is, to be out, with no barriers, just getting dirty and being fascinated with everything.
I have always liked wildlife. In my office I have a drawing of an otter I did when I was about 10. I was fascinated with picture books, especially ones with large mammals. It’s come full circle now, but it took time to get there. I went to Brandeis University and wound up studying anthropology. After my last exam, my dad drove me to Georgia, and I walked all the way home on the Appalachian Trail. I was a 1988 thru-hiker. That shaped my outlook, and I went on to work all over doing outdoor education and wildlife work. I went back to school at University of New Hampshire and got an undergrad degree in wildlife management. My first job after was working on a black bear project in Vermont; after that my career trajectory was set – I wanted to work as a field-oriented wildlife biologist.
I went on to New Mexico State University to get my master’s in wildlife science, and I studied elk and social conflicts around elk in the southern Rockies, at the border of New Mexico and Colorado. I met my wife in graduate school there; she’s also a wildlife biologist. We worked out west, and I was in Washington State with the Forest Service and then the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. We wanted to have a family, and both our families were back east, so we decided to move back. I can’t emphasize enough that in finding a great job, timing is everything. We moved back in early 2000s and got really fortunate: we both wound up in the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. She works with colonial nesting birds and does research on black terns and great blue herons. I started as the deer biologist in 2005 and then three years later became the moose biologist.
My focus since 2008 has just been on moose. The north woods are big here: the commercial forestlands encompass 10 million acres, and this is where the core moose range is. Sometimes people are shocked that we have an area this size, especially in the East. It’s township and range there; there aren’t names of places, just commercial forestlands and small camps. It sometimes drives me crazy when people call it the “wilderness” and think of it like a single entity, because it’s not that. Even though it is really important habitat, it’s a working forest.
In the early 2000s we got a lot of input from people operating and recreating in the north woods, saying when they went up to their camps in the spring, they were finding a lot of dead moose. That was from the winter tick. It’s the biggest concern I have for moose right now – so big it almost feels singular. In 2014, we started a study looking at cow and calf survival with New Hampshire Fish & Game and University of New Hampshire, working with Dr. Pete Pekins, a professor and mentor of mine from UNH days, and now a friend. In January, capture crews netgun moose from a helicopter, and then we put GPS collars on them. Every day we check if those moose are living or dead. When one dies, we have a 24/7 response team to recover the animal and find out why it had died. We work with the animal health lab back at University of Maine, so we do both field necropsy and lab work looking at organs, blood, running tests, counting winter ticks, and weighing calves. The collars are designed to drop off them in the summertime if they survive, and then we go collect them and do it all again. After about 7 years, several peer-reviewed papers came from our work, so today we can unequivocally say the reason we lose so many overwintering calves a month or two before their first birthday is due to winter ticks.
Winter tick impacts calf survival, and it also impacts pregnancy rates, when cows have high tick burdens on them. Moose can pick up a cluster of questing winter tick larvae and get 1,000 ticks on them each time, to a tune of 90,000 total ticks. Adult female ticks can take more than a milliliter of blood. It is truly hard to fathom that winter ticks can cause so much blood loss that it can kill a 400-pound animal, but that is what happens. For example, we had one moose that we collared in January and 79 days later she died after losing a hundred pounds. All that, and the fact that winter ticks will get worse with short winters. It’s not a pleasant story.
We’ve done helicopter surveys every year starting in 2010, with help from the Maine Forest Service. We do two types of aerial surveys: transects within a 100-square-mile block, to get counts, and then sex and age surveys, where we classify a minimum of 100 moose and determine bulls, cows, or calves, and get adult and juvenile sex ratios. From these data we do computer modeling to get a sense of the population. Since 2000, moose have declined somewhat, but they were at a high point then. We live in a human-made forest. I don’t mean that as a judgment, it’s just that many people don’t understand that commercial forestry up here shapes the forest, and there’s a lot of moose food and no top-down predators. I mean, there’s the winter tick – that’s the biggest predator. We have low reproductive rates, and that’s a big challenge. But a lot of moose remain despite winter tick, and adult moose in Maine have a high survival rate. The question is: what is the right number of moose? With too high a population, you see low reproduction, an increase in disease, and an increase in winter tick, which is density-dependent, meaning more moose in an area, more winter tick.
I love moose and I want to conserve moose for future generations. Mainers and non-Mainers alike, everybody loves moose. A lot of people wonder why we don’t spray moose with an insecticide or acaracide, or spray the woods, but it’s not a simple solution. Acaricides don’t just kill ticks, but other organisms too. And of course, again, most of the land in that range is private. I want to make sure people know I think about these things all the time. I don’t just shrug ideas off. I have testified in front of the Maine legislation, explaining from our scientific standpoint why a lot of the currently proposed solutions are non-starters, based on the scale and scope of the moose core range, which is over 16,000 square miles.
From a scientific standpoint, what we need is a lower density of moose. Since 1980, our hunting has remained conservative relative to the population. If we bring down the density, we may be able to break the cycle of winter tick. We’ve been trying this approach for five years now, by issuing more permits in half of one experimental game management unit. But there hasn’t been enough hunting success there to see the results we had hoped for. We’re also working on determining whether we can predict where moose will acquire (based on forest harvest operations) the most winter ticks and if we can develop forest management recommendations that create forest harvest patterns that would help distribute moose and perhaps reduce winter tick burdens.
I’m an avid hunter myself, and I want to ensure as well that moose are “conserved” for future generations. Some people have a hard time with that, and I understand, it can feel contrary. But a moose dying from winter tick is a tragic thing, and it’s hard to see. And with winter tick and climate, and so many unknowns, it’s really hard to know what will happen. Candidly, these days, it can be very difficult to find hope. But having respect, admiration, and awe of wildlife in a beautiful place like Maine, and caring about conservation in the future – well, these are certainly bright spots. Seeing the conscientiousness of conservation and the passion that people have for moose, whether we agree on what to do or not, that gives me hope.
Every time I see a moose – and the nature of my field work allows me to see thousands of moose – it’s amazing. I love seeing them; there’s nothing that ever gets old about it. I see a moose in the woods, and I feel like I’m just starting to learn about them. There’s so much I don’t know and that I’ll never know. Time in the field is essential. When you talk to people who spend a lot of time in the woods, you can learn some amazing things from them. Observation is so important – it’s the cornerstone of doing science. And public support of science is really critical. We need to have science drive our understanding of everything. I know it can be frustrating because people want immediate answers and solutions, and science takes time. Believe me, I wake up every morning wishing I could find the solutions immediately too, but we need ones that make sense and actually work, and for that we need to lean on our science hard.
I always try to remember, “Wow, this is my work.” During our adult cow and calf survival study we put GPS collars on cows in the water using boats, where we come up alongside the moose and collar them while they’re swimming. It’s amazing to see them in the water, get up close and witness their behavior, and see how they can submerge – they essentially dive into the water to feed on aquatic vegetation. I feel the same when I’m doing aerial surveys and seeing them in the woods below, just moving around and doing their thing. I have this moment then, where I take a deep breath and go, “This is what I get to do for work.” It’s only about 30 seconds, and then I go back into being focused, but I always try to acknowledge, that wow, this is it. I’m fortunate to spend my time in the moose woods.
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