Hello everyone,
We've had a pretty light snow year this year in south central Alaska unlike last winter which was incredibly deep. Deep snow is good for snow cat'n but bad for moose forced on to highway corridors! The Alaska Moose Federation (AMF) has recently started some major habitat enhancement projects, away from the known moose collision corridors, to encourage the moose to winter back in the woods in future years. In fact, here's our Tucker 2000, which is also working on the site, with one of our happy customers about 60' away chomping on some trees we recently dropped.
One of our Snow Tracs provides transportation for the operators and the reporters who recently covered this story that we wanted to share with you. First, here's some of the equipment we're using.
This is a D8R Cat dozer provided by one of our partner organizations with a 20,000 lb roller chopper that the AMF purchased last year. The chopper can be filled with water, which doubles it's weight, thus the need for a big dozer to drag it around. The chopper 'chops' up the trees and disturbs the ground surface so the new willow, birch, etc. (trees moose like to eat) start growing new from the ground level up.
This new habitat mimics the natural cycle of a forest fire in strategic locations to draw moose off the highways. Here's a Alaska Fish & Game picture of new habitat after a similar habitat enhancement project where heavy equipment was used to clear aspen. You can see all the new moose food coming up the following year.
The dozer is owned by the Local 302 Employees Training Trust which provides operators for about 90% of major industry in the state of Alaska. They have partnered with us to give their apprentices real world training opportunities with AMF habitat projects. It's a great industry led, public/private partnership that can perform the work very inexpensively.
A local news agency covered the story last week: http://www.ktuu.com/news/ktuu-prote...h-habitat-enhancement-20130329,0,998312.story
With this specific combination of equipment, we can enhance types of habitat with 6" or less size of trees (black spruce, mature willow, etc.) at about 5 acres per hour which is really rolling. As we get into the bigger trees, shear blades with logger cabs will be attached to the dozers.
After a good week's worth of work, I took my 7 year old out for some ice fishing near the project. She LOVES riding in the 'Bus'!!!
All her friends always beg to go with.
The AMF is up to 5 Snow Tracs and Snow Masters now that are either owned by the AMF or by our volunteers who are the life blood of our programs. Our goal is to eventually put together a team of about 8 of them, in good running order, so we can start taking entire classrooms of kids out on the coolest field trips they ever had. This will be one of the best ways to get them out to see projects like these so they can learn what it takes to keep healthy moose populations away from highway and railroad corridors. We're going to work this summer to continue to build the fleet.
We've had a pretty light snow year this year in south central Alaska unlike last winter which was incredibly deep. Deep snow is good for snow cat'n but bad for moose forced on to highway corridors! The Alaska Moose Federation (AMF) has recently started some major habitat enhancement projects, away from the known moose collision corridors, to encourage the moose to winter back in the woods in future years. In fact, here's our Tucker 2000, which is also working on the site, with one of our happy customers about 60' away chomping on some trees we recently dropped.
One of our Snow Tracs provides transportation for the operators and the reporters who recently covered this story that we wanted to share with you. First, here's some of the equipment we're using.
This is a D8R Cat dozer provided by one of our partner organizations with a 20,000 lb roller chopper that the AMF purchased last year. The chopper can be filled with water, which doubles it's weight, thus the need for a big dozer to drag it around. The chopper 'chops' up the trees and disturbs the ground surface so the new willow, birch, etc. (trees moose like to eat) start growing new from the ground level up.
This new habitat mimics the natural cycle of a forest fire in strategic locations to draw moose off the highways. Here's a Alaska Fish & Game picture of new habitat after a similar habitat enhancement project where heavy equipment was used to clear aspen. You can see all the new moose food coming up the following year.
The dozer is owned by the Local 302 Employees Training Trust which provides operators for about 90% of major industry in the state of Alaska. They have partnered with us to give their apprentices real world training opportunities with AMF habitat projects. It's a great industry led, public/private partnership that can perform the work very inexpensively.
A local news agency covered the story last week: http://www.ktuu.com/news/ktuu-prote...h-habitat-enhancement-20130329,0,998312.story
With this specific combination of equipment, we can enhance types of habitat with 6" or less size of trees (black spruce, mature willow, etc.) at about 5 acres per hour which is really rolling. As we get into the bigger trees, shear blades with logger cabs will be attached to the dozers.
After a good week's worth of work, I took my 7 year old out for some ice fishing near the project. She LOVES riding in the 'Bus'!!!
All her friends always beg to go with.The AMF is up to 5 Snow Tracs and Snow Masters now that are either owned by the AMF or by our volunteers who are the life blood of our programs. Our goal is to eventually put together a team of about 8 of them, in good running order, so we can start taking entire classrooms of kids out on the coolest field trips they ever had. This will be one of the best ways to get them out to see projects like these so they can learn what it takes to keep healthy moose populations away from highway and railroad corridors. We're going to work this summer to continue to build the fleet.
