Photographs courtesy of Joanne Uris
Uma stuck around Great Camp Uncas, in Raquette Lake, for almost three weeks in January. Then she came back in March, staying two more weeks. It was something Joanne Uris, who lived at the camp with her then-boyfriend and Uncas caretaker Paul Matey, will never forget. “Every day Uma would slowly move around the property,” says Joanne. So she’d strap on snowshoes and follow the moose at a safe distance. “You could hear the sound of her big teeth chewing balsam and birch branches. She was just so sweet and her mane was so pretty and I would just stare at her and think, I can’t believe I’m looking at a moose.”
Joanne lived at Uncas, what was once the Vanderbilt family’s summer spread, for seven years, until she and Paul left in 2019. “It was nice to be there, but it wasn’t easy—six miles back in the woods on a dead end.”
But the trade-off, particularly in colder months, was a serene landscape that drew bears, pine martens, beavers, otters and Uma, named by Paul. Moose had passed through the property before, but one that lingered for so long, bedding down beside buildings and strolling camp walkways, concerned Joanne. A ranger came by to observe Uma and reported that she was healthy, likely under two years old and possibly separated too early from her mother.
And then she was gone. “We saw tracks going across the lake, but the woods are so dense, she could have been in there. I was constantly looking for her,” Joanne says. “I’m grateful for the experience. I still have pieces of Uma’s hair in a plastic bag that I’d find in the snow where she was laying down.”
Photographer Jeff Nadler understands how Joanne feels about Uma. For seven years he’s mounted trail cams in what’s now the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest near Great Sacandaga Lake, hoping to catch the elusive megafauna in action. What he’s discovered is a thriving pocket of Alces alces, though smaller than the population in Clinton County, according to a Department of Environmental Conservation scientist who saw Jeff’s footage.
Moose favor land that’s been logged, where open forest and new tree growth mean accessible meals and traversable paths. “I’ve done a lot of walking around, finding tracks” in places far from hiking trails, miles from the road, explains Jeff. He adjusts his cameras based on season, when moose behavior and diet change, and has filmed bears, bobcats, fishers, ermines, raccoons, red foxes, snowshoe hares and numerous moose, including a sow and her calves and a bull who has reappeared the last five years.
“There’s clearly an animal path that this moose always follows,” says Jeff. “And when it walks through the woods and goes around a specific tree, it always tilts its head to avoid hitting its antlers.”
The creatures in his footage are impossibly enormous, with leggy grace and goofy faces. Their dewlaps dangle and some of the bulls have racks the size of satellite dishes.
Jeff has seen nine moose “live”—his photographs of a bull at Helldiver Pond have appeared in this magazine—but “I love the videos,” he says. “It is almost an obsession. I want to go all the time to check the cameras.” Sometimes, though, “there’s a voice in the background—my wife—saying, ‘You’re going up there again?’”
See a compilation of Jeff Nadler’s Wilcox Lake Wild Forest moose footage on YouTube. Visit www.jnphoto.net to see his photographs of moose.
