New Study Says Moose Are Native To Colorado, Upending Decades Of Wildlife Management

Wildlife managers at Rocky Mountain National Park are weighing serious options for reining in the park’s growing moose population, from expanded fencing to outright culling. Their justification rests partly on the claim that moose are not native to Colorado and were only brought there by human hands in the late 1970s. A new study published in the Journal of Biogeography argues that claim is built on a much shakier historical record than anyone has acknowledged.

Researchers pulling together newspaper archives, photographs, archaeological bone records, and Indigenous oral traditions found substantial evidence that moose were present in Colorado’s Southern Rocky Mountains long before the state’s first official reintroduction in 1978. Records include multiple sightings of mother moose with their calves, pointing to local breeding populations. Calling moose “non-native,” the researchers contend, can distort the very management decisions now being made about their future.

With an estimated 3,500 moose now in Colorado, a number that has grown steadily since 1978, park managers have raised alarms about moose grazing on willow stands, displacing beavers, and reshaping riverside ecosystems. But the historical foundation for treating them as outsiders does not hold up.

Colorado Moose Were Breeding Here Before Any Official Reintroduction

To build their case, scientists, historians, and tribal knowledge holders from the University of Colorado Boulder, New Mexico State University, and the Northern Arapaho Tribe’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office, among others, searched records that wildlife managers had never examined together. They combed the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection for every mention of moose between 1859 and 1970, reviewed 19th-century diaries and photo archives, and examined published archaeological bone records from throughout Colorado, drawing also on Indigenous oral histories, songs, and place names from Native nations with ancestral ties to the region.

In total, the team identified more than 30 published newspaper accounts of moose in Colorado between 1860 and 1970, many describing multiple animals at once. Critically, a number of those records documented mothers and calves together. Adult female moose maintain stable home ranges and return to the same areas year after year, so spotting a mother with her calf is generally read as evidence of a locally established breeding population rather than a lone animal passing through.

One standout example: a photograph in the archives of the Pikes Peak Library District shows an adult female moose and a juvenile shot near Fairplay, Colorado, around 1912, decades before any official reintroduction. It did not appear in the media records the researchers surveyed, suggesting some evidence of moose presence may have been overlooked. A wildlife biologist named Denney, interviewing people in the North Park area in the 1950s, also documented numerous moose sightings that never reached any newspaper. The assembled record almost certainly captures only a fraction of actual moose presence.

What Bones and Indigenous Knowledge Add to the Picture

Bone records from Colorado add another layer, though with important caveats. Multiple archaeological sites across the state have turned up possible moose remains, with some dating back thousands of years and others to the centuries before European contact. None of these identifications were thoroughly documented, and all should be verified with modern scientific techniques before informing management decisions.

In the Arapaho language, the word for moose is hinenihii, meaning “big man,” and an older term referencing the moose’s distinctive flat nose suggests longstanding familiarity with the animal. Moose hides were traditionally used to make drums for the Arapaho Eagle Drum Society, and an 1890 account documented an Arapaho song referencing moose.

Moose appear in Ute oral traditions as well, including a story about two brothers who hunt and eat one, along with taboos against moose consumption or interaction. Those taboos could help explain why moose bones are rare in some older sites: if people avoided the animal, fewer remains may have ended up where archaeologists later excavated. Jicarilla Apache accounts describe moose as part of “the ancient order of things,” with informants noting the animals had disappeared from the Rio Grande country above Santa Fe. A memory of absence implies a much older memory of presence.

How a Label Gets Applied, and Why It Matters

Researchers frame part of what went wrong as “shifting baseline syndrome,” each generation of scientists treating what they first encountered as normal. By the time formal wildlife management began in Colorado, any remaining moose were scattered and easy to miss, and the post-settlement ecological upheaval may have made them appear rarer than they once were.

Elk offer a pointed comparison. Wiped out of Rocky Mountain National Park in the 19th century and officially reintroduced in 1913, elk are today considered native despite causing significant ecological disruption. Moose and elk share strikingly similar regional histories but have landed on opposite sides of the native-versus-outsider line.

Wildlife managers are weighing interventions at Rocky Mountain National Park to reduce moose pressure on sensitive ecosystems. Researchers are not arguing those populations should go unmanaged. What the evidence does undercut is the specific justification for treating moose as invasive outsiders, a label that shapes what actions officials consider acceptable to take.

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