Meet Moose, my traveling Jemicy mascot. He’ll be helping me document some of the places I’ll be visiting down under.
Moose are native to a broad swath of the northern hemisphere. But not Maryland. What about the photo of the moose swimming under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge?
April fool!
For serendipitous reasons, Jemicy adopted as its mascot an animal far out of its native range. A chunky log beast with rebar antlers, built by kids as a holiday creation, took up residence and stuck around long enough to evolve into the handsome steel sculpture that now graces the entrance to the school.
Since Jemicy has an introduced moose, I went looking to see if moose had also been introduced to New Zealand, as so many game animals were during the past centuries. Sure enough, I came upon stories of the Fiordland moose – a mysterious, elusive, and possibly still extant remnant of a population left from release in the mid-1900’s. No verified sightings have occurred since 1952, but Moose and I will be keeping an eye out when we’re traveling around the South Island.
Bringing biodiversity home 
Emily is it very crowded there?
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Hey Braeden! No, it is not crowded at all here. Tasmania has a population density of about 7 per square kilometer. Right now I am in a rural part of New Zealand, on the South Island, which is even lower in terms of population. We are learning to drive on the left side of the road, and one friend told us, “Oh, don’t worry. There are so few people on the road there, it doesn’t matter which side you drive on!”
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