Alaska Fish & Wildlife News
March 2025
Ask a Wildlife Biologist: Why do moose lick cars?
An 8th grader at Birchtree Charter School in Palmer asked, “Why do moose lick cars?”
Do moose lick cars? Yes, it’s real. Moose really do lick cars. So do caribou. It even made the New York Times. In 2020, the New York Times reported, “Signs were put up by officials of Jasper National Park, in the western province of Alberta, to try to stop moose from licking road salt off idling cars — a serious problem that can present dangers to the vehicles, the drivers and the moose.”
Southcentral Alaska, where Birchtree Charter School in Palmer is located, has lots of moose and lots of cars. Palmer is also home to the FaWNA Lab, (Foraging Ecology and Wildlife Nutritional Analysis Lab) of the Alaska 
Department of Fish and Game. Wildlife biologist Kristin Denryter (right, with caribou calves at the FaWNA lab) is the director of the lab, and she’s had personal experience with this. She provided a couple pictures of a white truck, covered with brown road grime, spotted with tongue marks from caribou licking the truck.
She wrote: I have a photo of a truck with lots of lick spots from caribou from during my grad school work. Vehicles accumulate dirt, which has minerals, and minerals are hard to come by in the environment during winter. Salt could certainly be one of the minerals they seek as sodium is a driver of appetite, but it is possible it could be another type of mineral they’re after—hard to say for sure without getting a profile of the dirt.
I watched them do it—we had taken the truck into the pen for some work and they did that almost obsessively until we got the truck out of the pen.
Wildlife biologist Tom Paragi worked with moose in Interior Alaska for decades before retiring last year. He wrote:
Having grown up in the Northeastern U.S. where road salt was commonly applied to paved roads in winter during icy conditions (and quickly rotted car bodies), I was pleasantly surprised to learn salt was rarely used in Fairbanks when I moved up here 40 years ago. The extreme cold and dry air that was more common in prior decades allowed sublimation of road ice, which tends to be less slippery anyway in cold temperatures.
I noticed that DOT began using some type of melting agent on roads around here a decade or more ago because we commonly now have freeze-thaw conditions in midwinter. It showed up as a whitish film on car bodies, and my steel tire rims quickly began to rust. It is especially heavily applied near intersections of major urban thoroughfares, producing liquid slush even to a few degrees below freezing. I suspect moose (and hares and porcupines and other animals as well) are licking salt from vehicles because it is an important trace element in their diet but relatively rare to find in winter, when dirt "licks" are often covered with snow unless exposed to direct sunshine during lengthening winter days and warmer temps. For moose, I suspect it is easier to remain standing (vigilant and able to take evasive moves if necessary) and lick a vehicle body than to get down on their knees in a more vulnerable position to lick road slush.
The “dirt licks” he refers to are wild places where animals lick soil, mud, and rocks for naturally occurring minerals. These are sometimes quite distinct with lots of tracks and sign.
Have an “Ask a wildlife Biologist” question? Send it to riley.woodford@alaska.gov
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