By Dan Kraker, 90.1 MPR

It’s still a tough time to be a moose in Minnesota.

Though their numbers show “no significant change” compared to last year, the moose population is still down dramatically from years past, state Department of Natural Resources officials said Thursday.

Researchers counted a lot more moose in their 2014 aerial survey — about 4,300 versus 2,700 in 2013. The higher number, however, is likely due to ideal survey conditions, not to a spike in the population, DNR wildlife research manager Lou Cornicelli said.

Heavy snow cover this year made it easy to spot the huge dark animals against an unbroken expanse of white, and there there’s always a lot of uncertainty in one year’s count, he said.

The long term trends haven’t changed, he added. Northern Minnesota’s moose counts have fallen by more than half in the past eight years.

“We know we’re losing a lot of calves,” Cornicelli said. “We know our adult mortality rate is over twice what we see in other places. So we know that the population is still in decline, it can’t be increasing at the rates that we’re losing animals.”

The DNR launched an ambitious first of its kind study last year to try to figure out what’s causing moose to die so quickly.

Researchers placed global positioning satellite collars on more than 100 adult moose. When an animal died, in many cases they were able to quickly recover the body to identify what exactly killed it.

Twenty-one percent of adults were killed in the first year. Wolves killed about half; the other deaths were health related, caused by winter ticks, or diseases like brainworm and liver fluke infections, said Michelle Carstensen, the DNR wildlife health program supervisor who heads the project.