Published in Interface Tech News
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. ‹ Continuing its march to prominence in the electronic payment and invoicing sector, Bottomline Technologies will be providing the back end for Atlanta-based United Parcel Service's (UPS) electronic billing system. The company also expects a November reseller agreement with Unisys, of Blue Bell, Pa., to really get rolling in January.
"We have implemented an electronic invoice delivery system for (UPS)," said Bottomline CEO Dan McGurl.
Clients using UPS' Web site will be able to register to receive invoices on-line and make electronic payments, including viewing billing summaries and details of specific invoices.
McGurl described the deal as "a multi-million dollar one" that is part of a continuing relationship between the companies.
It is another step in Bottomline's efforts to support the increasing demand for electronic invoicing and payment. McGurl said the recent uncertainty about the safety and reliability of the U.S. postal system has pushed more companies into exploring alternatives to paper invoice and payment systems.
Another boost for Bottomline in the New Year will be the resale of Bottomline software by banking and financial services giant Unisys. The agreement was made in November, but the ramp-up period lasted through late December, paving the way for sales this month.
"This product that we've developed," McGurl said, "is something that (Unisys) didn't have." He expects the company to integrate Bottomline's electronic payment-to-invoice matching software into its own offerings, saving time for both payer and payee, and allowing better control of cash flow for both parties.
Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at the Gartner Group, said Bottomline is thriving even as the economy slides. "The truth is it's doing pretty well," Litan said.
She said electronic invoicing is growing, with about 20 percent of all business-to-business invoices already electronic.
The advantage for companies like UPS, who are Bottomline clients, Litan said, is the adaptability of the software packages.
"They allow the customers to live in the paper world and the electronic world at the same time," she said, making migration a comfortable process for the client.
And closing the deal with Unisys will provide a big boost for both companies. "Unisys has been trying to penetrate this market for a while," Litan said, adding that Bottomline's small sales force "needs all the partners and resellers they can get."
Wednesday, December 12, 2001
Friday, December 7, 2001
Capitol Computers expands training facility
Published in Interface Tech News
AUGUSTA, Maine ‹ Responding to rapid growth in demand for its services and projected expansion in the future, Capitol Computers is expanding its training space from 30 to 50 workstations and hiring two additional instructors.
The company will continue to provide sales, maintenance, and technical support to businesses and educational institutions, but sees the most growth potential in the area of computer-based training, according to vice president and general manager Paul DeSchamp.
DeSchamp said the company's revenue increased 18 percent from 2000 to 2001, and projected it will increase a further 40 percent by 2002. Those figures are driven by a 200 percent increase in offerings of career-based, self-paced training classes from 2000 to 2001. DeSchamp expects the class offerings will double again in the next year.
Capitol's biggest client is the state of Maine, to which it offers employee training and serves the state's career counseling program, retraining workers laid off from other industries. Among the services Capitol offers are certification programs for computer technicians and network engineers.
The new space, with 20 additional desktop machines, all with high-speed Internet connections and access to networked printers and file servers, is scheduled to open Dec. 1. DeSchamp added that there is more room for expansion, should it be needed.
He admits that mill closings and other layoffs around Maine have boosted his business, but stressed that, while he is happy to help people learn new skills, "we don't want to see more closings."
Katherine Jones of the Boston-based Aberdeen Group's education and e-learning research section said that, while computer-based training is nothing new, computers are being used more and more for educational purposes.
In the current economic slowdown, Jones said, people need to retrain or improve their skill sets to get and keep jobs ‹ that means more business for training centers. Added to that can be state or even company programs offering financial incentives to laid-off workers learning new skills.
According to Jones, one area of significant promise is certification for industrial workers. There are programs which train people to handle hazardous material, operate heavy equipment, or perform other tasks, offering certifications at the end of the process.
"You need about five of them to run a backhoe," Jones said. And the certifications expire, bringing people back every year or two to keep current. "Most of the stuff is learnable online and testable online," she said. "That's a perfect thing for training companies."
AUGUSTA, Maine ‹ Responding to rapid growth in demand for its services and projected expansion in the future, Capitol Computers is expanding its training space from 30 to 50 workstations and hiring two additional instructors.
The company will continue to provide sales, maintenance, and technical support to businesses and educational institutions, but sees the most growth potential in the area of computer-based training, according to vice president and general manager Paul DeSchamp.
DeSchamp said the company's revenue increased 18 percent from 2000 to 2001, and projected it will increase a further 40 percent by 2002. Those figures are driven by a 200 percent increase in offerings of career-based, self-paced training classes from 2000 to 2001. DeSchamp expects the class offerings will double again in the next year.
Capitol's biggest client is the state of Maine, to which it offers employee training and serves the state's career counseling program, retraining workers laid off from other industries. Among the services Capitol offers are certification programs for computer technicians and network engineers.
The new space, with 20 additional desktop machines, all with high-speed Internet connections and access to networked printers and file servers, is scheduled to open Dec. 1. DeSchamp added that there is more room for expansion, should it be needed.
He admits that mill closings and other layoffs around Maine have boosted his business, but stressed that, while he is happy to help people learn new skills, "we don't want to see more closings."
Katherine Jones of the Boston-based Aberdeen Group's education and e-learning research section said that, while computer-based training is nothing new, computers are being used more and more for educational purposes.
In the current economic slowdown, Jones said, people need to retrain or improve their skill sets to get and keep jobs ‹ that means more business for training centers. Added to that can be state or even company programs offering financial incentives to laid-off workers learning new skills.
According to Jones, one area of significant promise is certification for industrial workers. There are programs which train people to handle hazardous material, operate heavy equipment, or perform other tasks, offering certifications at the end of the process.
"You need about five of them to run a backhoe," Jones said. And the certifications expire, bringing people back every year or two to keep current. "Most of the stuff is learnable online and testable online," she said. "That's a perfect thing for training companies."
Thursday, December 6, 2001
Remember Christmas in Thailand
Published in the Current
In Thailand, Christmas isn’t the national holiday it is here in the U.S. In the mostly Buddhist country, only a small percentage of people are Christians. But the Rev. Phil Gage said the country is increasingly embracing the commercial aspects of the holiday.
“You hear Christmas carols, you see Christmas lights,” on the streets of the major cities, he said. Part of that is because the king’s birthday is Dec. 5, and that is a cause for great national celebration.
Christmas, he said, “sort of fits right into that.”
Gage, now the pastor of Scarborough’s Free Baptist Church at Eight Corners, and his wife spent 25 years as missionaries in Thailand.
They were there for four years at a stretch before returning home to the U.S. for a year of traveling to speak at various churches.
They served as spiritual advisers to villagers, city-dwellers and other missionaries, and helped make Christmas a special time.
“Here we’d normally gather as families,” Gage said. In Thailand, “people come together and celebrate as a church family.”
Many Christians in Thailand are not estranged from their Buddhist families, Gage said, but they have big church community events to celebrate the holiday.
There are pageants, caroling and worship. And while Christians make up less than five percent of the population of Thailand, they travel to the houses of church members, singing and having fun at each home. One year, Gage said, they took two minivans and started caroling at 10 p.m. They finished the next morning at 5 a.m., when they ate a giant meal of boiled rice with all sorts of side dishes, a favorite Thai meal.
The Thais don’t tend to exchange gifts, but they will give each other cards, Gage said. And decorations aren’t the same as we would expect. “It is more apt to be the traditional sort of decoration,” Gage said.
In his time in Thailand, Gage traveled all over the country. Some tribal groups, he said, have converted to Christianity en masse, but in a way that has allowed them to retain tribal customs.
Before they became Christian, they would hold large parties for each new year, but would get drunk and fights would erupt.
After they became Christian, they stopped having the celebrations for a time, but realized they missed dressing up in traditional costumes and doing their dances and other cultural performances. So they decided to have their traditional celebrations but substituted tea for the alcohol, making the events more peaceable.
Thais, he said, tend to focus more on people and relationships than on material objects the way Americans do, especially around the holidays, but Gage has also seen parallels between Thai Christmas celebrations and the way his church members observe the occasion.
“(Thais) will act out the birth of Christ a lot,” he said. Recently some of the members of his church wanted to do a live nativity scene outside the church. “That really clicked with me,” Gage said.
But Thais also will bring their own culture to church. “They would perform their cultural dances,” he said, as well as songs.
Like in the U.S., Thai holiday church services often feature children performing.
Gage and his wife adopted two Thai children, who are now 30 and 25. Gage became a grandfather for the fourth time Nov. 30, when his daughter gave birth to his first granddaughter in Massachusetts.
His daughter, Missy, makes crèches for the holidays, including a special Maine themed one, with a fisherman and woodsman, among other figures. She also makes crèches or ornaments that she gives to each family in Gage’s church during Advent.
And now, back in the states, Gage has an easier time decorating his home and the church as well. Over there, he said, “you had to really be creative in terms of decorating.”
But even so, lights and candles were common, and through the 1980s more and more Christmas decorations came to Thailand, appearing in storefronts and advertisements, primarily in cities around the Buddhist nation.
In Thailand, Christmas isn’t the national holiday it is here in the U.S. In the mostly Buddhist country, only a small percentage of people are Christians. But the Rev. Phil Gage said the country is increasingly embracing the commercial aspects of the holiday.
“You hear Christmas carols, you see Christmas lights,” on the streets of the major cities, he said. Part of that is because the king’s birthday is Dec. 5, and that is a cause for great national celebration.
Christmas, he said, “sort of fits right into that.”
Gage, now the pastor of Scarborough’s Free Baptist Church at Eight Corners, and his wife spent 25 years as missionaries in Thailand.
They were there for four years at a stretch before returning home to the U.S. for a year of traveling to speak at various churches.
They served as spiritual advisers to villagers, city-dwellers and other missionaries, and helped make Christmas a special time.
“Here we’d normally gather as families,” Gage said. In Thailand, “people come together and celebrate as a church family.”
Many Christians in Thailand are not estranged from their Buddhist families, Gage said, but they have big church community events to celebrate the holiday.
There are pageants, caroling and worship. And while Christians make up less than five percent of the population of Thailand, they travel to the houses of church members, singing and having fun at each home. One year, Gage said, they took two minivans and started caroling at 10 p.m. They finished the next morning at 5 a.m., when they ate a giant meal of boiled rice with all sorts of side dishes, a favorite Thai meal.
The Thais don’t tend to exchange gifts, but they will give each other cards, Gage said. And decorations aren’t the same as we would expect. “It is more apt to be the traditional sort of decoration,” Gage said.
In his time in Thailand, Gage traveled all over the country. Some tribal groups, he said, have converted to Christianity en masse, but in a way that has allowed them to retain tribal customs.
Before they became Christian, they would hold large parties for each new year, but would get drunk and fights would erupt.
After they became Christian, they stopped having the celebrations for a time, but realized they missed dressing up in traditional costumes and doing their dances and other cultural performances. So they decided to have their traditional celebrations but substituted tea for the alcohol, making the events more peaceable.
Thais, he said, tend to focus more on people and relationships than on material objects the way Americans do, especially around the holidays, but Gage has also seen parallels between Thai Christmas celebrations and the way his church members observe the occasion.
“(Thais) will act out the birth of Christ a lot,” he said. Recently some of the members of his church wanted to do a live nativity scene outside the church. “That really clicked with me,” Gage said.
But Thais also will bring their own culture to church. “They would perform their cultural dances,” he said, as well as songs.
Like in the U.S., Thai holiday church services often feature children performing.
Gage and his wife adopted two Thai children, who are now 30 and 25. Gage became a grandfather for the fourth time Nov. 30, when his daughter gave birth to his first granddaughter in Massachusetts.
His daughter, Missy, makes crèches for the holidays, including a special Maine themed one, with a fisherman and woodsman, among other figures. She also makes crèches or ornaments that she gives to each family in Gage’s church during Advent.
And now, back in the states, Gage has an easier time decorating his home and the church as well. Over there, he said, “you had to really be creative in terms of decorating.”
But even so, lights and candles were common, and through the 1980s more and more Christmas decorations came to Thailand, appearing in storefronts and advertisements, primarily in cities around the Buddhist nation.
Mainers remember Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941
Published in the Current
Infantryman Albert Riopel
Albert Riopel, 84, spends most of his days in the Maine Veterans Home on Rt. 1 in Scarborough. And though he is in the company of a great many veterans of World War II, he hasn’t found anyone else who was at Pearl Harbor the day the Japanese attacked.
He volunteered for the infantry in 1940 and after training he went to Pearl Harbor, to prepare for an attack on Japanese positions on Corregidor, an island stronghold in the Pacific.
Preparations were under way as negotiations deteriorated between the Japanese and U.S. governments, and war appeared more probable. But nobody expected the attack that peaceful Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941.
He was just getting up when the attack began.
“It was a fiasco. (The Japanese) knew what they were doing,” Riopel said. They bombed the harbor, the barracks and the airfield, destroying much of the military hardware in Hawaii.
Riopel’s unit was sent to Clark Field to defend it from attack.
Everyone expected the Japanese to land and try to take the island, and Riopel thinks they might have succeeded. But they didn’t try.
“They wanted to cripple the Navy,” he said. “It was over in no time at all.”
After the attack, the invasion force, including Riopel, headed for Corregidor, but found it surrounded by enemy submarines.
So they invaded New Guinea instead. Fighting in the jungle was merciless, he said, and difficult because of the thick underbrush.
The Japanese would hide all over the place and attack from any direction, Riopel said.
“Every time we’d go on patrol the first one (in line) would get killed—the first one and the last one,” Riopel said.
He doesn’t like to remember the scenes he saw, but did say he watched many of his friends die over the four years he spent fighting in the jungle.
“It was rough,” Riopel said. “I lost a lot of my friends there.”
He said fighting in the Pacific was brutal. “Many times I wished I was in Europe,” he said, where soldiers would capture a city and then celebrate.
Riopel especially envied the access to wine the European soldiers had.
But in the Pacific things were different.
“You capture one island and you go on to the next,” he said.
Even worse, General MacArthur wouldn’t let his unit go back to the U.S. “He wouldn’t let us leave because we had experience,” Riopel said.
He especially respected the Australian soldiers, whom he described as tough and skilled fighters, though they would stop for tea twice a day, he said, “no matter where they were.”
He wasn’t a career soldier, and after the war ended he came to Maine and worked in mills for more than 40 years. He lived in Westbrook and two weeks ago sold the house he owned in that town for over 55 years.
His daughter lives in Cape Elizabeth, and he gets a lot of visits from his family, but when he sits alone sometimes, he said, memories of what he saw in the war come flooding back.
Nurse Revella Guest
Revella Guest was born Nov. 8, 1912, in Brownville Junction to a Canadian mother and an English father. She went to high school in the town, and then went to Portland to study nursing at Maine General Hospital, graduating in 1935.
Her papers, now in the care of a relative in Scarborough, tell the story of her life, including her experience as a nurse at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Restless with private duty work around Portland, she became an Army nurse on Jan. 30, 1930. By March of 1941 she was heading to Tripler Army Hospital near Honolulu, the capital of the then-territory of Hawaii. She was lodged at Hickam Field, which would suffer serious damage in the Dec. 7 attack. On Dec. 5, though, the nurses were moved from their four-person apartments back to rooms at Tripler.
That night, she and some of her nursing friends went to dinner on the battleship USS West Virginia with some warrant officers serving
on that ship.
As they ate and watched a movie, it never crossed their minds that Japan could attack. “Everybody was just having a good time and doing their duty. We never thought anything about that,” Guest said.
On Dec. 7, just like the day before, she was scheduled for the morning shift.
The attack
At 7 a.m., Dec. 7, she reported for work at the hospital, and was doing routine work on the ward, when it happened.
“All of a sudden the radio started blaring for all military people to report back to their stations. We had porches and I was out looking on the back porch, and I saw some, heard some guns, and I saw black smoke coming up. I thought, ‘My goodness! I’ve never seen that before!’” she said.
“Then the radio started to blare that we were being attacked by the Japanese. Then I called down to my friends where they were, and I told them to get up and get dressed because everybody was going to be working, because we were being attacked by the Japanese,” Guest said.
The hospital had fewer staff on duty over the weekend, with some people having time off and even some patients out on a pass. But she knew it would be a busy day.
“We knew that when we were being attacked that we were going to have casualties because we were the largest general hospital on the island. In fact, we were the only general hospital,” she said.
She spent the first few minutes getting the walking wounded out of the hospital to make room for more seriously injured people. When she was done, only two patients remained, both of whom were in traction, but they were not about to let that stop them.
“I had to watch those guys like a hawk,” she said, “because they were going to cut themselves out of traction and go to war.”
Her ward became a post-operation ward, where patients went after surgery. “You had amputees, abdominal wounds, head injuries. You name it, and it was there,” Guest said.
She and one other nurse were racing around caring for 65 patients, changing intravenous fluids and providing other care to the men, as
they came out from under anaesthesia. They didn’t have time to do proper charts, but instead scribbled the time of the last morphine injection a patient received on a scrap of paper at the head of each bed.
As night fell, the hospital was blacked out to protect against air raids. She needed to give a shot to a patient on the porch, and removed the piece of blue carbon paper from the front of the flashlight, so she could see the vein. “I’d take that thing off and some guard would holler, ‘Put out that light or I’ll shoot!’ I’d yell, ‘Shut up until I give this shot!’” she laughed.
She worked through the whole night and into the next day without any sleep. She was first able to change into a clean uniform at 6 a.m. Dec. 8.
A few days after the attack, she and a friend went to the local telegraph office to deliver their first news to their families that they were OK. Her telegram just said, “Revella.”
The first shipload of patients headed back to the mainland on Christmas Day, after Guest and her colleagues spent a lot of time Christmas Eve bandaging patients to be ready for travel.
Still tied to Maine
Her family remembers her as having loved Maine and returning as often as possible.
Her papers and other effects were distributed among the family. Many of her World War II records and items are now with her sister-inlaw’s
cousin, Ken Dolloff of Scarborough.
Infantryman Albert Riopel
Albert Riopel, 84, spends most of his days in the Maine Veterans Home on Rt. 1 in Scarborough. And though he is in the company of a great many veterans of World War II, he hasn’t found anyone else who was at Pearl Harbor the day the Japanese attacked.
He volunteered for the infantry in 1940 and after training he went to Pearl Harbor, to prepare for an attack on Japanese positions on Corregidor, an island stronghold in the Pacific.
Preparations were under way as negotiations deteriorated between the Japanese and U.S. governments, and war appeared more probable. But nobody expected the attack that peaceful Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941.
He was just getting up when the attack began.
“It was a fiasco. (The Japanese) knew what they were doing,” Riopel said. They bombed the harbor, the barracks and the airfield, destroying much of the military hardware in Hawaii.
Riopel’s unit was sent to Clark Field to defend it from attack.
Everyone expected the Japanese to land and try to take the island, and Riopel thinks they might have succeeded. But they didn’t try.
“They wanted to cripple the Navy,” he said. “It was over in no time at all.”
After the attack, the invasion force, including Riopel, headed for Corregidor, but found it surrounded by enemy submarines.
So they invaded New Guinea instead. Fighting in the jungle was merciless, he said, and difficult because of the thick underbrush.
The Japanese would hide all over the place and attack from any direction, Riopel said.
“Every time we’d go on patrol the first one (in line) would get killed—the first one and the last one,” Riopel said.
He doesn’t like to remember the scenes he saw, but did say he watched many of his friends die over the four years he spent fighting in the jungle.
“It was rough,” Riopel said. “I lost a lot of my friends there.”
He said fighting in the Pacific was brutal. “Many times I wished I was in Europe,” he said, where soldiers would capture a city and then celebrate.
Riopel especially envied the access to wine the European soldiers had.
But in the Pacific things were different.
“You capture one island and you go on to the next,” he said.
Even worse, General MacArthur wouldn’t let his unit go back to the U.S. “He wouldn’t let us leave because we had experience,” Riopel said.
He especially respected the Australian soldiers, whom he described as tough and skilled fighters, though they would stop for tea twice a day, he said, “no matter where they were.”
He wasn’t a career soldier, and after the war ended he came to Maine and worked in mills for more than 40 years. He lived in Westbrook and two weeks ago sold the house he owned in that town for over 55 years.
His daughter lives in Cape Elizabeth, and he gets a lot of visits from his family, but when he sits alone sometimes, he said, memories of what he saw in the war come flooding back.
Nurse Revella Guest
Revella Guest was born Nov. 8, 1912, in Brownville Junction to a Canadian mother and an English father. She went to high school in the town, and then went to Portland to study nursing at Maine General Hospital, graduating in 1935.
Her papers, now in the care of a relative in Scarborough, tell the story of her life, including her experience as a nurse at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Restless with private duty work around Portland, she became an Army nurse on Jan. 30, 1930. By March of 1941 she was heading to Tripler Army Hospital near Honolulu, the capital of the then-territory of Hawaii. She was lodged at Hickam Field, which would suffer serious damage in the Dec. 7 attack. On Dec. 5, though, the nurses were moved from their four-person apartments back to rooms at Tripler.
That night, she and some of her nursing friends went to dinner on the battleship USS West Virginia with some warrant officers serving
on that ship.
As they ate and watched a movie, it never crossed their minds that Japan could attack. “Everybody was just having a good time and doing their duty. We never thought anything about that,” Guest said.
On Dec. 7, just like the day before, she was scheduled for the morning shift.
The attack
At 7 a.m., Dec. 7, she reported for work at the hospital, and was doing routine work on the ward, when it happened.
“All of a sudden the radio started blaring for all military people to report back to their stations. We had porches and I was out looking on the back porch, and I saw some, heard some guns, and I saw black smoke coming up. I thought, ‘My goodness! I’ve never seen that before!’” she said.
“Then the radio started to blare that we were being attacked by the Japanese. Then I called down to my friends where they were, and I told them to get up and get dressed because everybody was going to be working, because we were being attacked by the Japanese,” Guest said.
The hospital had fewer staff on duty over the weekend, with some people having time off and even some patients out on a pass. But she knew it would be a busy day.
“We knew that when we were being attacked that we were going to have casualties because we were the largest general hospital on the island. In fact, we were the only general hospital,” she said.
She spent the first few minutes getting the walking wounded out of the hospital to make room for more seriously injured people. When she was done, only two patients remained, both of whom were in traction, but they were not about to let that stop them.
“I had to watch those guys like a hawk,” she said, “because they were going to cut themselves out of traction and go to war.”
Her ward became a post-operation ward, where patients went after surgery. “You had amputees, abdominal wounds, head injuries. You name it, and it was there,” Guest said.
She and one other nurse were racing around caring for 65 patients, changing intravenous fluids and providing other care to the men, as
they came out from under anaesthesia. They didn’t have time to do proper charts, but instead scribbled the time of the last morphine injection a patient received on a scrap of paper at the head of each bed.
As night fell, the hospital was blacked out to protect against air raids. She needed to give a shot to a patient on the porch, and removed the piece of blue carbon paper from the front of the flashlight, so she could see the vein. “I’d take that thing off and some guard would holler, ‘Put out that light or I’ll shoot!’ I’d yell, ‘Shut up until I give this shot!’” she laughed.
She worked through the whole night and into the next day without any sleep. She was first able to change into a clean uniform at 6 a.m. Dec. 8.
A few days after the attack, she and a friend went to the local telegraph office to deliver their first news to their families that they were OK. Her telegram just said, “Revella.”
The first shipload of patients headed back to the mainland on Christmas Day, after Guest and her colleagues spent a lot of time Christmas Eve bandaging patients to be ready for travel.
Still tied to Maine
Her family remembers her as having loved Maine and returning as often as possible.
Her papers and other effects were distributed among the family. Many of her World War II records and items are now with her sister-inlaw’s
cousin, Ken Dolloff of Scarborough.
Moose on the loose in Cape
Published in the Current
School bus drivers and neighbors have spotted two moose wandering around in the Great Pond area of Fowler Road, often in the early morning.
Out of concern for the well being of the animals and the safety of drivers on the road, the Cape Elizabeth Police Department asked a wildlife biologist from the state to take a look at the area and help determine whether the moose should be tranquilized and relocated or left alone.
The biologist visited Fowler Road Tuesday afternoon, and didn’t see the moose, one of which is reportedly smaller than the other. But he did make a recommendation to Police Chief Neil Williams about what to do.
“His feeling is that they’re going to move on,” Williams said. With the warm weather and the apples on the ground nearby, they have food for the moment. But when it cools off, and when the snow comes, Williams said, “they’ll move on with the supply of food.”
The police will continue to keep an eye on the area, and have ordered signs be put up warning drivers to watch out for moose.
If the moose are a mother and a calf born in the spring, the little one could weigh as much as 400 pounds. The mother would weigh between 700 and 900 pounds, and could stand as much as six feet tall at the shoulder.
Moose are especially dangerous to drivers because their coats are dark and their eyes are higher than most headlight beams, so drivers don’t see their reflections the way they do with deer or other smaller animals.
Also, moose tend to be active between dusk and dawn, when visibility is lowest. And they can be unpredictable, sometimes darting out in front of an oncoming car.
For now, Cape’s moose will have a temporary home, but will move where nature supplies the food.
“They should be up north, but they’re not,” Williams said.
School bus drivers and neighbors have spotted two moose wandering around in the Great Pond area of Fowler Road, often in the early morning.
Out of concern for the well being of the animals and the safety of drivers on the road, the Cape Elizabeth Police Department asked a wildlife biologist from the state to take a look at the area and help determine whether the moose should be tranquilized and relocated or left alone.
The biologist visited Fowler Road Tuesday afternoon, and didn’t see the moose, one of which is reportedly smaller than the other. But he did make a recommendation to Police Chief Neil Williams about what to do.
“His feeling is that they’re going to move on,” Williams said. With the warm weather and the apples on the ground nearby, they have food for the moment. But when it cools off, and when the snow comes, Williams said, “they’ll move on with the supply of food.”
The police will continue to keep an eye on the area, and have ordered signs be put up warning drivers to watch out for moose.
If the moose are a mother and a calf born in the spring, the little one could weigh as much as 400 pounds. The mother would weigh between 700 and 900 pounds, and could stand as much as six feet tall at the shoulder.
Moose are especially dangerous to drivers because their coats are dark and their eyes are higher than most headlight beams, so drivers don’t see their reflections the way they do with deer or other smaller animals.
Also, moose tend to be active between dusk and dawn, when visibility is lowest. And they can be unpredictable, sometimes darting out in front of an oncoming car.
For now, Cape’s moose will have a temporary home, but will move where nature supplies the food.
“They should be up north, but they’re not,” Williams said.
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