Moose Cow Yearling, Browsing on Willows, Wyoming

(Click image to enlarge)

This young female moose is browsing on willows as her sister and mother do the same thing nearby. The three of them still travel together, but they will soon separate. This photograph was captured as a horizontal image with a 600mm lens on a 50 megapixel camera, but the long legs of this moose extended well beyond the bottom of the frame. She stayed still just long enough for me to pan downward and capture another overlapping image that contained her rear legs but not her entire head. I stitched the two images together and after cropping the result square I ended up with the 60 megapixel photograph shown above.

After expanding for most of the 20th century North American moose population has been in steep decline since the 1990s. Moose are the largest extant species in the deer family, typically inhabiting boreal and mixed deciduous forests in the Northern Hemisphere. They are aquatic mammals and excellent swimmers that are known to dive underwater to reach plants on lake bottoms. Moose are the only deer species capable of feeding underwater.