The Fiordland moose is supposed to be extinct. The last animal anyone could prove existed was photographed in 1952, and for decades the official view has been that New Zealand’s only moose herd died out in the wilderness where it was released. Yet people keep seeing one.
In March 2025 two separate groups of overseas trampers reported a moose on the Kepler Track. Neither managed a photograph. This month a set of twelve hidden cameras is due to come out of the bush near Dusky Sound, and they may finally settle a question New Zealand has argued about for more than 70 years. Do moose still live in Fiordland?
How moose came to New Zealand
Moose are not native to New Zealand. They arrived through the same acclimatisation enthusiasm that brought deer, rabbits and stoats. A first release in the Hokitika area in 1900 failed, and the last of those animals was shot around 1908 after it took to raiding gardens.
The second attempt worked, at least for a while. In 1910, ten Canadian moose, four bulls and six cows of the subspecies Alces alces andersoni, were released at Supper Cove at the head of Dusky Sound in remote Fiordland. The herd established itself in the rugged Seaforth and Wet Jacket Arm country, some of the least visited land in the country.
The last confirmed sighting in 1952
For a few decades moose were shot and seen around Dusky Sound, then the trail went cold. The last scientifically confirmed record dates to 1952, when Robin Francis-Smith photographed a cow at Herrick Creek and Percy Lyes shot the last bull ever taken legally on the same expedition.
After that, nothing solid. No bodies, no clear photographs, no antlers handed in for years at a time. The scientific consensus settled on the simplest explanation, which was that the moose had died out. Ken Tustin’s own peer-reviewed work notes that the confirmed records end around 1952 and that the animals were widely presumed extinct after that.
The DNA evidence
The extinction story has one large problem. In October 2002 wildlife biologist Ken Tustin and his wife Margie collected a clump of hair snagged on vegetation at Wet Jacket Arm. They sent it, along with a second sample known as the Harper hair, to Trent University in Ontario, Canada. In 2005 the laboratory confirmed both as moose, Alces alces.
The detail that mattered most was freshness. Peter Gatley of Deer Improvement, which handled the samples, said the hair could only have been exposed to the elements for weeks, rather than years, to give a usable DNA reading. In other words, a live moose had shed it not long before it was found.
There is also a blurry image. In 1995 one frame from Tustin’s time-lapse cameras showed what he calls a probable female moose, its back sloping in a way that does not match a deer. The same cameras recorded about 1,500 images of red deer and just that single possible moose. It is suggestive, not proof.
It is worth being clear about where this evidence comes from. It has been gathered and championed by people who believe the moose survive. That does not make it wrong, but it is not independent of the search itself, which is part of why the debate has never been settled.
Ken Tustin and the search
No one has done more to keep the question open than Ken Tustin. Known across the deer-hunting world as the Moose Man, he has hunted for evidence since the early 1970s, written a book called A Wild Moose Chase, and spent hundreds of days in Fiordland setting cameras and reading the bush for browse sign on mountain ribbonwood, a favourite moose food.
Now 80, Tustin has not given up. He believes four or five moose are alive in Fiordland today. Critics point out that he has believed in a surviving herd for half a century without ever producing the photograph that would end the argument.
The 2025 sightings on the Kepler Track
The most recent excitement came in March 2025, when two groups of experienced overseas trampers reported moose within a fortnight of each other, both on the Kepler Track near Te Anau.
On 13 March, American veterinarian Norbert Nigon and his wife Virginia Schuning saw a cow moose about 30 to 50 metres away on the Balloon loop near Rainbow Reach. They described a long face, dark brown colour, two large nostrils and two large ears before the animal moved into the bush. They took no photograph.
On 29 March, three hikers from Quebec, Annie-Pier Bourgeois, Antoine Beauchamp and Chanel Sabourin-Dubois, reported a large dark animal about 25 metres away near the Iris Burn. Bourgeois described it as very large, as large as a horse and even larger. Again, no photograph.
Tustin rated both reports highly. He called Nigon’s account immaculate and described the Canadian sighting as strong and credible, noting that the witnesses had the background to know a moose when they saw one.
What the Department of Conservation says
The Department of Conservation is not convinced. Its Te Anau operations manager, John Lucas, says the moose are believed extinct and that, without photographic proof, the 2025 sightings are most likely a deer, either a red deer or possibly a red-wapiti cross that has been mistaken for a moose.
Lucas also notes that the Kepler Track is a long way from the 1910 release site at Dusky Sound. His caution points to the real trap for casual sightings. Wapiti, a large North American elk, were released in Fiordland in 1905, and a big wapiti or wapiti cross seen briefly in poor light is exactly the kind of animal that fuels blurry moose footage online.
Twelve cameras and the wait for proof
Which brings the story to now. In January 2026 Tustin’s team was flown into a thicket of mountain ribbonwood in a catchment draining into Dusky Sound, where they set twelve trail cameras in country he believes moose still use to feed.
The cameras are due to be retrieved around the middle of this year. At the time of writing, no images from them have been made public. If one of those twelve cameras has caught a moose, it would be the proof the search has chased for more than 50 years. If they show only red deer, the sceptics will feel confirmed, and the mystery will roll on to the next season.
For now the Fiordland moose sits where it has sat for decades, somewhere between extinct and merely unseen. New Zealand has form for writing off species that later turn up alive, as the recent rediscovery of yellowhead thought lost in Arthurs Pass showed. Whether the moose joins that list may come down to what twelve cameras saw in the dark.
Do you think moose still roam Fiordland, or is the trail long dead? Tell us what you reckon in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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