There’s a moose on the loose in Minnesota

Late last month, Bernie Stang of Paynesville, Minnesota, bundled her daughter and a friend into her car and set out to find a wayward moose named Rutt.

After five hours, they found him trotting through a harvested corn field near Grove City, Minnesota, about twenty miles away.

Then Ms. Stang did what many Minnesotans have been doing lately. She uploaded the images to a Facebook page dedicated to following Rutt’s every move.

The page, called Rutt-The Central MN Moose on the Loose, has more than 38,000 followers, many of whom, like Ms. Stang, think nothing of dropping everything and jumping into their cars, hoping for a glimpse to capture Minnesota’s most famous moose.

“It’s all gotten out of hand in Minnesota, all for one moose,” she said Wednesday. “He brought a lot of joy and happiness to so many people.”

A map on the Facebook page that tracks Rutt’s path indicates that he has wandered about 280 miles since September 23, from Alton, Iowa, to Sebeka, in central Minnesota, where he was spotted on Saturday.

Many have speculated that he is trying to find other elk in the densely forested far northeastern corner of the state, where most of Minnesota’s estimated 3,700 elk live.

Tiffany Wolf, a wildlife epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota who studies moose, said it was not clear why Rutt had traveled through the southern and central parts of the state, “quite far outside the area where we would expect to see moose in Minnesota.” .”

But she said Rutt — whose fans named him after a moose voiced by Rick Moranis in the 2003 animated Disney film “Brother Bear” — appeared healthy and was about 12 to 18 months old.

Marysa Anderson of Cosmos, Minnesota, went looking for Rutt late last month and found him on a dirt road near a combine outside Atwater, Minnesota, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) away. He looked straight at her as she took his photo.

“It was just an unforgettable experience,” she said.

Rutt has appeared in trail camera footage as a shadowy apparition moving at night, and in videos and photos showing him grazing on prairie grass, walking across fields or cutting off a lone figure on a country road.

Fans have painted him against a backdrop of billowing white clouds and rendered his likeness in wood. Sherry Hancock of Cokato, Minnesota, wrote a poem about Rutt moving north to his home.

“He’s quite inspiring because he seems to have a goal in mind – he seems to know where he’s going, and he’s on his way there,” she said. “It’s almost as if he enjoyed the course himself.”

After going through Staples, Minnesota the day before Thanksgiving and drawing a crowd, Rutt made the front page of the local newspaper, Staples Worldunder the headline “Famous Moose Spends Day in Staples Area.”

John Brichacek said he was inspired to create a cocktail for his bar, the 2 Tall Tavern in Cushing, Minnesota, after neighbors spotted Rutt at his family’s estate in Browerville, Minnesota.

“We were watching the moose do moose things and we thought, ‘We should do a moose drink,’” he said. “‘We have to do something for Rutt.'”

The drink he created — equal parts vodka, Kahlua and Baileys Irish Cream — is topped with two miniature pretzels that hang like antlers from the rim of a glass.

“People loved it,” Mr. Brichacek said. “We just keep joking and talking about Rutt.”

Brenda Johnson of Dassel, Minnesota, said she created the Facebook page “Moose on the Loose” in 2018 to track another moose that was later hit and killed by a driver.

The page had about 1,000 followers and was largely inactive until people started posting to it when Rutt was spotted in Iowa in late September.

The page “blew up” when Rutt entered Minnesota, and has been “growing and growing” ever since, Ms. Johnson said.

She said she was worried about Rutt now that he was drawing crowds every time his latest location was posted on the page.

“Our main concern is his safety,” Ms Johnson said.

Dr. Wolf, of the University of Minnesota, said she was interested to see how far people might be able to follow Rutt as he moves into northern Minnesota.

“I think once he gets to that woods, though, he’ll definitely fall off the radar, and I think that’ll probably be a good thing,” she said. “A successful trip.”