Mark – First, great to have you in here more. Really.

Second, the “vanishing” moose are just part of the larger tapestry of imaginary decline. When I do environmental talks, I’m always amazed at the amazement of people who think everything has steadily gotten worse over the last century. This is from a 2002 Wall Street Journal article — it was the nearest to hand, electronically speaking – on the boom in critter disposal businesses in the Northeast:

…While many smaller animals such as squirrels, raccoons and opossums never left, Dr. Foster says that large animals and birds are now making big comebacks: bear, moose, coyotes, beavers, turkeys, eagles, osprey and the ubiquitous deer. One reason is that the comeback of the forest has afforded them habitat and protection. At the same time, people who live in sprawling leafy suburbs offer them safety and lots of food.
It is a wildlife-damage-control professional’s dream come true. Mr. LaFountain specializes in beavers, which abound in the Bay State. Their population has tripled since 1996 to 70,000 and counting, say wildlife officials — more beavers than when Paul Revere made his midnight ride in 1775. When they flood driveways, inundate septic systems, threaten to contaminate wells or gnaw down prized trees, Mr. LaFountain’s phone rings….
….The great Eastern forest has been coming back since the middle of the 19th century. It’s not all back and it’s not the same forest. But about 70% of the land that was forested in 1600 is forest again today, says Douglas W. MacCleery, a senior policy analyst with the U.S. Forest Service. That’s about 737 million acres — nearly two-thirds of it in the eastern third of the nation. While some replanting was done, especially in the South, most of the Eastern forest grew back naturally.
Some states in the Northeast have been regaining their forest since the Erie Canal opened up the Midwest and farmers moved to better cropland there. Left untended, abandoned farmland reverts to forests in a matter of decades. Massachusetts and Connecticut — once a virtually unbroken sea of trees — had lost 70% of their forests by the Civil War. Today, nearly two-thirds of their land is covered with trees. Similarly deforested, Vermont is now 80% woods, New Hampshire 90%. New York, only 25% forest in 1880, is 66% forest today.
Between 1907 and 1997, the Forest Service reported, 12 states in the Northeast, among them the most densely populated in the nation, regained almost 26 million acres of forest.
But reforestation alone can’t account for wildlife population explosions. Historically, wildlife was managed for good or ill, first by Native Americans, then by European settlers, then farmers and state fish-and-game agencies. Today, wildlife agents and conservationists argue, their agencies are cash-strapped, burdened with extraneous work, or hamstrung by antihunting-and-trapping edicts.
Mr. MacCleery notes that, contrary to the myth of early forests as ancient, impenetrable and static, they were shaped relentlessly by both nature and man. In the 8,000 years since forests advanced north before retreating glaciers, Native Americans, most living in fixed villages, shaped both woods and wildlife. In a federal report on U.S. forests, Mr. MacCleery writes: