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Maine Aerial Moose Population Survey Underway

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[expatriate]

Anyone ever seen target video from Air Force combat aircraft? We killed a lot of armor in Kosovo that turned out to be water tanks with a piece of stove pipe attached -- designed to soak up heat during the day and look like a tank at night.

I'm not suggesting that Maineiacs would wage a deception campaign, but the lesson is that identifying targets based on IR signature isn't always a sure thing. On the surface one might think a moose's heat signature might be unique, but when you consider how it might compare to a cow, horse, or bear, or how a moose calf might compare to a deer, I think it'd get a bit fuzzier. I'm curious what level of accuracy they think they'll get, and how high or low numbers might affect sportsmen.

[ This Message was edited by: expatriate on 2003-01-22 18:19 ]

[bitmasher]

Apparently your not the only one that has questions about the accuracy of IR:

http://www.sportingjournal.com/main30.shtml

It looks like the estimate came out lower than a traditional survey.

If a traditional survey is shaky at best, it seems that they have nothing to calibrate their method against which is bothersome considering this is being touted as a "scientific method" to come up with population numbers. At least when your busting tanks, one could have a base case to continually calibrate against (a test grounds). It is kind of hard to make a test grounds with moose, I would imagine.

That is a shooting from the hip analysis though, perhaps someone has been clever enough to come up with a good calibration standard.

[expatriate]

Yeah, I'm skeptical. If you do the math, they surveyed 27 percent of the area, and then plugged in a 25 percent fudge factor to account for moose they might've missed. Yet they don't say how that fudge factor was developed. This is starting to sound like body counts in Vietnam -- you can finagle them to justify any answer you want.

Aside from factors I already mentioned, if there's 1.3 moose per square mile, how do they know that they're not counting the same moose on IR more than once during the days they're up there flying around? I'll agree that there's a possibility they could undercount, but I'd argue there's significant cause to think they could OVERcount as well by counting things that aren't moose and counting the same moose more than once. Bottom line is that it makes the 25 percent figure sound a lot like rectal extraction.

MaineGuide are you out there? What's your take on this?