The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is working with the Kenai Natives Association to boost available moose browse on 85 acres north of Sterling. It is a partnership that Fish and Game hopes will spark conversation about potential future collaborations to improve Kenai Peninsula’s Game Management Unit 15A moose browse, said Sue Rodman, Fish and Game program coordinator.

“Looking at the big picture, all the land owners that have an interest in moose habitat, at some point I see us sitting at a table and having that discussion,” Rodman said.

In your hand it looks like any other ordinary metal spring, right?

Wrong.

That little spring is made of memory metal — Nitinol to be precise — and it can do amazing things, explains Alan Warwick.

You stretch the spring out between your hands, and Warwick holds a hairdryer beneath it.

“See how much force there is?” he says.

That’s astonishing, you think. You try, but the little spring in your fingers pulls you hands together as the hairdryer heats it.

“There can be a lot of force. Each molecule has a bit of strength,” he says.

When he stepped down from the truck the moose calf was already laying in the snow under a black spruce.

The Kenai Merit Inn superintendent and a Kenai Police Department officer stood around the moose, the officer holstering his gun.

“He’d been around at least once a week,” said Lisa Dorrough, watching with her friend from the apartment’s porch behind the Merit Inn.

“From what I hear, it lost its mother,” her friend, Kevin Jackson said.

The two had come out of their apartment when they heard the gunshot.

Bill Osborn has gardened in Kenai’s community garden for more than 20 years.

“It’s kind of a therapy thing for me to put things in the ground and watch them grow,” Osborn, 84, of Kenai, said.

While the city’s community garden is fenced in to protect its produce from moose, rototilled by the city and hooked up to water, perhaps its greatest perk is its access to the gardening community, said Lydia Clayton, an agriculture and horticulture agent for the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service.