I was on Salmo Mountain in Washington state, way up next to the border with British Columbia when I found an odd track, about 4 inches long — not an elk, not a moose. When I asked the forest biologist, he laughed.

“Yes, we have a small herd of caribou here in the Selkirks,” he said. They were a cross boundary herd, spending time in northern Idaho, northeastern Washington and British Columbia. At the time there was said to be about 50 animals in the South Selkirk herd. That was the year wildlife managers had documented the state’s first breeding wolf pack in modern times.

Now take a look at the documented wolf packs in northeast Washington. There is a wolf pack called Salmo. Care to make any guesses at what happened to the last caribou herd in the lower 48?

In 2018, the battle to save the caribou was lost, the herd labeled “functionally extinct” with only three female caribou left, the rest gone to feed cougars and wolves. In a footnote to history, the Smithsonian magazine documented the lone survivor, netted and transplanted to a 20-acre enclosure near Revelstoke, B.C.

If we had caribou in Oregon, would we let wolves and cougars eat them all? We are doing that with the moose.

In the early 2000s Oregon moose numbers were going up. In 2006, biologists counted nine cows, eight calves and two bulls in the west Sled Springs and Wenaha units. They estimated 30 moose in the northern Blue Mountains that year.

At the same time, moose numbers were increasing in southeast Washington and across the border in Idaho.

Vic Coggins was the district biologist in the Enterprise office at the time. From 2006 on, he made it a point to conduct road and aerial surveys to count moose. By 2010, the number of moose in Oregon had been adjusted to 50 animals and the population estimate topped out in 2013 at 70 moose.

“The last survey was March 2021,” Coggins said. Although Coggins has retired from ODFW, he stays active, working as a wildlife consultant and is particularly interested in moose and elk numbers in the area he calls home.

“We are probably back down around 30 moose in the state,” Coggins said.

Until about 2014, moose numbers seemed to be rising with occasional reports of calves in the Snake, Chesnimnus and Minam units and less frequent reports of moose in in the Imnaha and a little group of moose that were reproducing in the west Sled Springs unit that Coggins believes was tied to the Wenaha, where they probably wintered.

“They just aren’t expanding like they were,” Coggins said. “We have personally had cameras on Alder Slope on our place and the last time we had a picture of a moose was 10 years ago.”

According to Coggins, one of his counterparts in Washington thinks there is just a handful of moose left in the Evergreen State. “He told me about one that was just killed that had produced twin calves a lot of years.”

This is not an unfamiliar story.

“The average person doesn’t have a clue as to how fast these wolves reproduce,” Coggins said. “As the wolf numbers have increased the moose have decreased and that’s a fact. I know of a number of moose that have been killed by wolves recently. There are virtually wolf packs in every unit. At least one pack in each unit and most have a couple packs,” Coggins said.

Another limiting factor is that Nez Perce tribal members are shooting moose under treaty rights.

“That’s not helping,” Coggins said. “And it’s hard to know how many because they don’t keep track of harvest.”

On the flip side, the Umatilla tribes currently do not hunt moose. Coggins said there are tribal members in both communities that are concerned about what’s going on with the moose.

The moose were one of Coggins’ priorities during his days as an ODFW bio. When wolf numbers began to go up and moose numbers started going down, Coggins and fellow bio Pat Matthews proposed trying supplemental transplants.

“But that didn’t go anywhere,” Coggins said. The easiest place to get the moose then was the state of Washington.

“Washington has issues with them coming into the towns. And we gave them some bighorn sheep, and I know a trade could get worked out, but it seems like nothing happens except we get less moose.”

Care enough about moose to make a prediction about where moose numbers go from here? Care enough to do better than Washington did with their caribou? At this point, it is up to the ODFW director in Salem and the governor. Do we let moose go to the wolves or do we give the moose a chance?

In Coggins’ opinion, both wolves and cougars are responsible for the steep decline in moose numbers. “And some of the (tribal) hunting activity has not helped. A dead moose is not going to reproduce.”