A juvenile moose died after being hit by a car driving up Main Street in Burlington on Tuesday.
The driver was unable to safely avoid the moose as it ran into oncoming traffic, Burlington police said. The car sustained minor damage.
WCAX, which first reported the news, showed footage of police officers approaching the fallen animal after it was hit.
Vermont Fish & Wildlife officials, who removed the moose’s body on Tuesday, estimated the moose was about a year old and would have recently left its mother.
“We see a lot of those young moose kind of wandering around trying to find a place of their own, and they often end up in weird places where we wouldn’t expect them, like in downtown Burlington,” said Nick Fortin, the deer and moose project leader at the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department.
The moose would have had to travel fairly far from a more densely wooded habitat to reach the city, Fortin said.
“I don’t know that we would consider anything in the Greater Burlington area to be great moose habitat,” Fortin said. “They generally try to avoid people if they can. That said, it’s still Vermont, so you don’t have to go that far to get into a bigger block of forest.”
Police told WCAX that the young moose could have been scared by the fireworks on Monday night, but Fortin said that would have been unlikely.
“It’s certainly possible (the moose) got spooked, and that’s why it ended up in a weird place because it just ran in a direction not really knowing where it was going,” Fortin said. “But I don’t think noise would be it. It would more likely be just the people. People get close, and it tries to run away from them.”
According to Fortin, deer and moose killed by cars in Vermont can be salvaged and processed for meat if reached in time. Although Fortin didn’t know for sure, he said that may have happened with this moose.
“We have a program … called Venison for Vermonters that works on donating venison, largely from roadkill to needy families or to food shelves,” he said.
