A bull moose stands head and shoulders above brush in the “Burn,” an area of some 4,000 square miles in Canada’s Northwest Territories. To grow massive racks, bulls need habitat rich with food but where other moose are scarce.

A bull moose’s antlers are “luxury tissue” that demonstrate the health of both the animal and its habitat.  According to moose expert Dr. Valerius Geist, for a young bull to grow superior antlers it must mature in a low-density population of moose and “in habitats rich in deciduous forage, primarily willows that grow in the flood plains and deltas of silt-laden rivers.” Silt is extremely fertile soil and fewer moose mean less competition for the best food.

But achieving low moose density is, like comedy, not pretty.  In Geist’s words, moose left to their own devices will enjoy “phenomenal birth rates.”  So to produce tremendous antlers, a moose population has to experience at least a decade of severe calf predation, usually carried out by bears.  The poetic irony is that the grizzly’s claws grow unmatched moose antlers. So as numbers go down, more trophies go up. The moose pictured here are all the Alaska-Yukon category of moose, the world’s largest, coming from a wide, but related, geographic area of northeast Alaska and Canada’s southern Yukon and southwest Northwest Territories.  And the first one is the best of all.