On Friday, May 26, Kathleen and Leonard Tucker returned home around 8 p.m. to find a calf stuck deep in the snow behind their home.
As it lay still in the snow, Kathleen’s initial impression, as she discovered it through the kitchen window, was that it had died.
“He had a fallen in the deep snow in such a way his back was against the rock cut and his legs were higher than his body,” explained Kathleen. “So you could tell he was exhausted. I thought he was dead (at first) because he had just exhausted himself trying to get free.”
The Tuckers had been away from home for about four hours, so they estimated it had been there, stuck and struggling, for about three-to-four hours.
They called up Leonard’s brother, Robert, to help conduct the rescue operation. The two brothers set to digging out the imperilled calf. It gave no resistance.
The moose gave no resistance and when it was freed, a video Kathleen took shows it simply wandering off, trotting around to the front of the house, with its new lease on life.
The Tuckers decided to follow it and soon found the calf resting on the beach.
“He collapsed and I’d say he laid there for … within the hour, anyway, before he finally recovered his strength and was helped a little bit,” said Leonard. “Then he got up and the he trotted off.”
They never saw the calf after that.
Kathleen and Leonard believe if the moose was left there, it would have eventually died. Therefore, they were lucky to get to it when they did.
Videos of the rescue have gone viral since being posted to YouTube on Saturday, May 27. As of Monday, May 29, one video had accumulated over 20,000 views. A second video, of the moose being successfully freed, had nearly 20,000.
