How an Ontario Local Recovered a Record Bull Moose a Wisconsin Hunter Wounded and Lost

Robert Donovan, of Ear Falls, Ontario, works in the lumber industry. He was on his way to work on September 23, 2023, when his boss radioed him about a group of archery hunters from Wisconsin who said that one of them had shot “the biggest bull moose he’d ever seen with points going everywhere on it” on Crown Land—which is public land in Canada. But they hadn’t found it.

“It drove me crazy all day that he couldn’t find it,” Donovan told MeatEater. “I radioed every couple of hours, and they said, ‘no luck, no luck.’”

After he got off work, Donovan, an avid moose and shed hunter himself, drove over to the area. By then, officials from the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) were there, helping the hunters search for the bull that the hunters had wounded. Donovan offered to pitch in, but they declined.

Donovan headed home but couldn’t stop thinking about the moose. He used satellite maps to look for where the bull might have run after it was wounded. He identified a pond that a gut-shot moose would go for water. That week, after work, he gridded the area but didn’t find anything. In the meantime, the hunter who’d shot the moose gave up and went back to the U.S.

“The second week, I went into work in the morning, got in my machine, looked back at the road and saw a big bunch of crows and eagles,” Donovan said. “I went over there, and the moose was lying there, probably 200 yards from the road.”

“I could not believe it,” Donovan said. “It was the biggest set of antlers I’ve ever found.”

Donovan also recovered the arrow near the moose, which led him to believe it hadn’t run far from where it was shot. He got a salvage tag from MNR and brought the antlers out of the field. He decided to get the rack measured by scorers forthe Big Game Records of Ontario, which uses the Boone & Crockett and Pope & Young scoring systems.

The paddles had 32 points, though only 23 were scorable. The rack came in at 204 2/8 inches, setting the “all-time record” for the province, a category that includes racks that have been picked up or of unknown origin. For comparison, Ontario’s biggest firearm-killed moose totaled 231 3/8 inches. The bull that Donovan recovered was not far from that mark.

Donovan mounted it on a plaque and hung it on a wall in his basement. “It was quite a find,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll find anything that big again, but you never know. I drew a bull tag up there for this year north of here, and you never know what you’ll run into up there.”

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