When Alaska-resident Britta Schroeder heard a soft jingle outside her cabin, she didn’t expect to find a moose.
She was laying in bed when she first heard the sound of the wind chimes strung to her cabin porch. When she glanced outside, she expected to see signs of wind, but instead found nothing.
Despite the stillness of the trees surrounding her cabin, the chimes continued to ring. She didn’t think much of it, but after a few minutes went by, she heard a loud thump on her porch. That’s when her dog’s ears perked up and she realized what was going on.
“I knew it was going to be an animal,” she told The Associated Press.
Sure enough, when she reached the cabin door and looked outside, there was a moose moving the chimes back and forth.
To capture the backwoods concert, she quickly grabbed her cellphone and started recording from behind her door, opening it just enough so that her dog wouldn’t get out.
In the video, which has now garnered more than 100,000 views, the moose nuzzles the chimes before it starts nibbling on the glass pendulum that hangs down the middle of the instrument.
Schroeder’s cabin is located near Healy, Alaska, just north of the entrance to Denali National Park and Preserve. Living in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, where she works as a cartographer for the National Parks Service, you can bet she’s no stranger to animal encounters.
“Interactions with wildlife happen daily here in Alaska,” she told National Geographic. “But this behaviour was novel to me.”
The moose continued to play with the chimes until it broke the pendulum in half, but Schroeder didn’t mind. She was more excited to share the video, so others could “marvel at the unique behaviour.”
