New York holds 77 documented moose records, all logged through GBIF rather than iNaturalist. That count tracks who found and reported a moose, not how many actually live in the state.
A recent return to the Adirondacks
Moose disappeared from New York by the late 1800s and only started showing up again in the 20th century, as animals dispersed south from a growing Vermont and New Hampshire range. Nearly every confirmed record today traces back to the Adirondack Park’s boreal forest and its scattered bogs and beaver-flooded wetlands, the mix of low browse and standing water a moose actually needs. Occasional wanderers push into the Tug Hill Plateau and toward the Catskills, but the high peaks region remains the real stronghold.
Why records climb in summer
Records peak from June through September, and that timing fits moose habits rather than any shift in numbers. Moose spend summer standing in Adirondack ponds and marshes, dunking for sodium-rich pondweed and escaping biting insects in open water, which puts them in plain view of hikers and paddlers. Records drop off sharply in winter, when moose retreat deeper into conifer cover and switch to browsing woody stems instead of aquatic plants.
Status in New York
NatureServe ranks the moose S3, vulnerable, in New York, and it’s native to the state. Numbers here stay small and geographically narrow, concentrated in the Adirondacks, and the moose’s future in New York depends on whether enough of that boreal wetland habitat holds up as the climate warms.
Full species profile
