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July/August 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Moose mystery Feature: Century club Feature: Honey Ranchers The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Adventurers on the trail of the legendary moose of New Zealand are not likely to find a sympathetic crowd at The Moose, a bar in the small town of Te Anau, on the doorstep of the country’s largest wilderness area, Fiordland National Park. Despite its name, the bar has no antlers or photos of the majestic ungulate on the walls. And the patrons, many of whom are deer hunters, are, well, non-believers.

"The general attitude seems to be that if there were moose in the park, hunters would have found them by now," says Jennifer Bisley of Peace River, Alta., who lived in Te Anau for a couple of years, worked at The Moose and was likely the only resident in town who could claim to have actually seen one of the big beasts in her lifetime, albeit in Alberta.

Last summer, a lab at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., tested tufts of hair collected in Fiordland National Park and concluded that they came from a moose. That seemed little short of miraculous, given that the last acknowledged sighting of a moose in New Zealand was in 1952 when a hunter tracked and killed one of the big browsers.

To tell the story of whatever possessed Canada to agree to ship moose to the other side of the world, not once but twice, and the remarkable tale of the man obsessed with searching for the descendants of those transplants we turned to our old friend Kennedy Warne, the former editor of New Zealand Geographic. Some years back, when Warne sailed through our offices on one of his frequent world tours, he pressed into our hands a book by Ken Tustin about his decades-long hunt for the long-lost moose. We were doubtful — how can you misplace an animal as big as a moose in a country as small as New Zealand? — but the lab tests obliged us to take a more open-minded view. Warne’s account is a portrait of Tustin and his unshakable conviction that remnants of the herd are still alive and is a sobering history lesson about the perils of tinkering with the species mix in any environment.

Nova Scotians aren’t known for their Spartan living habits. They smoke more and pack on more weight per capita than most Canadians. And they have one of the shortest life expectancies in the country. Despite those overall health statistics, parts of Nova Scotia have the largest concentration of people who have passed the magic age of 100. Writer John DeMont tracked down some of the province’s centenarians to plumb the secrets of their longevity, and he interviewed scientists studying the aging process. His report from that frontier we are all headed toward reveals no secret formula but does confirm some truisms about how to improve your chances of living to play piano at 101, as one of the centenarians DeMont interviewed is doing.

Congratulations to the writers, the photographers and my colleagues whose stories for Canadian Geographic in 2005 have been nominated for National Magazine Awards. Allan Casey’s story "Salt of the Earth"(Jan/Feb), about potash mining in Saskatchewan, was nominated in the Business category. "How the West was divided" (Jan/Feb), our special issue on the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan, was nominated in the Editorial Package category. Aritha van Herk’s essay in that issue, "Imagine one big province," was nominated in the Politics and Public Interest category. We have three nominations in the Science, Technology and the Environment category: Candace Savage’s "Back home on the range" (Jan/Feb), about the return of the buffalo to a grasslands preserve in Saskatchewan; Elaine Dewar’s "Nuclear resurrection" (May/June), about Ontario’s nuclear conundrum; and Chris Tenove’s "Romancing the stone" (July/Aug), about the jade industry in British Columbia. Finally, in the Words and Pictures category, we have two nominations: Philip Jessup and Jennifer Wells’ story of Toronto’s ravines, "Secret hollows" (May/June), and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s "World view" (Sept/Oct), a selection of his photos from space with accompanying commentary.

— Rick Boychuk

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