FAIRBANKS — Frank Borman of Delta Junction pulled out of his driveway one day last week and saw several cars parked alongside the road in front of his u-pick vegetable farm.
“I thought it was a traffic accident,” Borman said. “Then I got up there and seen it in the field.”
“It” is a white moose calf that has been wandering around Delta Junction for the past six months with its brown mother.
“It’s not as white as a polar bear, but it’s definitely white,” Borman said. “It was out there acting like a moose when I saw it. It was down on its knees eating cabbage.”
Despite several sightings throughout the past few months, nobody had been able to get a good picture of the mutant calf until Lisa Stossmeister snapped a couple photos last week that were posted on the Delta News Web, a local Web site that features photos and news from the small farming community 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks on the Richardson Highway. Stossmiester saw the moose eating leftovers in Borman’s garden along Tanana Loop Extension on consecutive days last week.
“One of my friends said he saw it the week before so one day I thought, ‘What the heck; we’ll go down and look for it.’ And it was right there,” she said. “We kind of lucked out. I’ve been in Alaska for 31 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. I was really excited.”
So were her two sons, 12-year-old Eric, who was the first one to spot the moose, and Doug, 8.
“My littlest boy said, ‘Mom, my heart is pounding so hard. I’m so excited about seeing this moose.’”
Stossmeister saw the moose on Dec. 1 and 2 but hasn’t seen it since. She makes a point of driving by Borman’s farm each day on the way home from her sons’ school.
The white calf doesn’t appear to be an albino, Stossmeister said.
“It doesn’t have pink eyes,” she said. “It has blue-gray eyes.”
The calf is whitest on its head and shoulders, Stossmeister said.
“It reminds you of a white lab,” she said. “It’s yellowish and tannish.”
Partial-albino or white-phased moose, as they are called, are not common, but they occasionally pop up in moose populations. Like other mammals, including humans, white or albino moose are the result of a double recessive gene that is passed down through generations.
After hearing multiple reports of the white moose calf in Delta Junction in October and November, wildlife biologist Steve DuBois with the Department of Fish and Game in Delta finally saw the moose on Thanksgiving weekend in the same neck of the woods that Stossmeister found it.
“It seems to be circulating right around there,” he said of Tanana Loop Extension.
DuBois got a picture, too, but the moose was far away.
“It’s not a very good picture, but there’s no doubt it’s a white moose calf standing next to its mama,” DuBois said. “It’s acting like a normal calf.”
White or partially white moose have been seen in other parts of the Interior, specifically the Alaska Range south of Fairbanks in game management unit 20C near Healy.
The Fairbanks Moose Lodge inherited a mostly white moose hide that came from a moose that was shot in that area in 1974. North Pole taxidermist Charlie Livingston made a head mount of that moose for the lodge back in 2005.
White moose also have been spotted in Denali National Park and Preserve. The last white moose seen in the Denali area was in 1990 when a white cow with brown spots was photographed near the Parks Highway.
The appearance of the moose near Healy prompted the state Board of Game to pass a regulation that prohibits shooting “white-phased or partial albino” moose — defined as being at least 50 percent white — in unit 20C. At this point, it is the only area in the state with such a regulation.
Contact staff writer Tim Mowry at 459-7587.
