Police kill wandering moose in Worcester

A 900-pound adolescent bull moose in the throes of its first mating season was shot and killed yesterday morning near downtown Worcester.

Probably in search of a mate, the 2-year-old animal had wandered onto an industrial street, meandered dangerously close to two major roads and an active railroad line, and galloped through a factory warehouse, startling first-shift machinists.

Environmental police spent 50 minutes trying to corral the antlered moose, clapping, shouting, and blasting sirens in fruitless attempts to scare the animal out of the city. After the 6-foot-tall beast jumped fences near Quinsigamond Avenue near rush-hour traffic, police killed the moose with a shotgun blast at 8:15 a.m.

"It was a public safety decision," said Lisa Capone, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. Law enforcement officers determined that the moose was too close to Interstate 290 and other traffic for a tranquilizer dart, which can send an animal into an almost drunken stumble.

"If the animal is darted, those strikes take up to 15 minutes to work," said Sonja Christensen, the state's deer and moose biologist. "In that time, you could have that mildly sedated animal wandering onto roads and other dangerous areas."

The moose upended the routine of metal workers at A.M. Castle & Co. when it galloped through an open truck bay, clomping through the block-long factory warehouse and out a door at the opposite end. George Vincovitch, a 71-year-old aluminum saw operator from East Brookfield, was seated at a desk filling out paperwork when he looked over his shoulder and saw the animal two feet behind him.

"It caught me kind of by surprise," Vincovitch said matter-of-factly. "I think I was the first one to see it because it ran right by me and up the other side where the other guys were working. Then one of them started to yell, 'There's a moose!' "

In 20 years at A.M. Castle, Vincovitch said, "it was the most unusual thing I've seen."

It was the fourth moose that environmental officials have killed since June, when one was shot in Bernardston near Interstate 91 and the Vermont border. Two others were put down in July after being struck by cars in Ashburnham and Sunderland. That same month officials successfully tranquilized a female moose in a residential neighborhood in Fitchburg and moved her to a wildlife preserve, Christensen said.

The first report of the moose came at 5 a.m., when a motorist called Worcester police after spotting the animal near the College of the Holy Cross. State environmental police joined the chase at 7:25 a.m.

"In the area where it was in Worcester, there weren't a lot of options where it could go," Capone said.