A vanishingly rare thing happened in South Thomaston early Thursday evening.
A man driving his truck along Spruce Head Road crashed into a roughly 600-pound moose, killing the animal and doing a number on the front end of his pickup, the Penobscot Bay Pilot reported. The man avoided any serious injuries; the moose is on its way to someone’s freezer.
While crashes involving moose are relatively common in Maine — a state famous for its vast stretches of undeveloped woods — this one stood out for the unlikely place in which it happened.
Just four other crashes involving moose have been reported in Knox County over the last decade, according to data from the Maine Department of Transportation. That’s down from 32 during the previous 10 years.
It’s not the only place: reported moose crashes have dropped dramatically across Maine, from a total of 618 in 2003, to just 216 last year — a 65 percent decline that state officials attribute in part to a shrinking moose population.
Every part of the state has seen a drop, but some of the starkest shifts have been in the midcoast, where several counties can now go years at a time without a vehicle crashing into the lumbering creatures.
Over the last decade, the lowest numbers of moose crashes have been reported in Knox County, followed by Sagadahoc (5), Lincoln (8) and Waldo (11) — down from between 15 and 62 reported in each county during the previous decade.
Other coastal counties — York, Cumberland and Hancock — have each seen a couple dozen crashes with moose in the last decade, down from more than 100 in each county over the previous decade.
By far, the largest numbers of moose crashes happen in Aroostook County — which saw 1,230 over the last decade — followed by three other interior counties: Penobscot, Somerset and Franklin. Just one coastal county — Washington County — ranked in the top five, with 169 moose crashes reported during that time.
State officials have identified declines in Maine’s moose herd as the biggest reason that the animals are spending less time in the paths of oncoming vehicles.
There are now an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 moose in the state, according to the state Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife website. That’s down from well over 100,000 In 1999, state moose biologist Lee Kantar said during an interview with the Bangor Daily News in 2019.
“Moose populations have been trending to the lower side, and most of the drop in crashes we have seen kind of coincides with that,” another state official, Eric Ham of MaineDOT, said at the time.
Ham also said that MaineDOT efforts to reduce crashes have made a difference, including the posting of moose warning signs, new lighting, trimming trees to give more visibility and doing landscape work to make areas less attractive to the animals.
However, Kantar warned that drivers should still be on guard for the animals, which can weigh more than 1,000 pounds and easily destroy a car.
“When spring breaks out and summer starts, that’s a tough time, and you know what? People need to be super-aware driving,” Kantar said. “People still need to be just as vigilant as they ever were.”