“Looking for a white moose is like looking for an alien,” Gerard Gale remembers thinking to himself on the evening of May 22. The Newfoundland-based photographer had gone out for a drive with the intention of taking pictures of the sunset, but with the quiet hope of finding the elusive white moose that had been spotted in the area before.

Despite its almost entirely white appearance, the moose was not albino. It is a rare piebald moose, referring to its mostly white with pigment speckled coat. As luck would have it, Gale not only saw the moose – he captured high-quality, close-up video of it. 

Getting just a few feet away, Gale managed to record the moose, seemingly unconcerned with his presence, casually munching on the shrubs.

“The closer he got the more my mind went blank in thought,” Gale recalls. “Can this really be happing? Who else had got this close with a piebald? Being 3 feet away from such a majestic animal of that size is enough to scare anyone.”

Piebald moose are rare, though several sightings have occurred in the Stephenville area recently. On his original Facebook post, Gale called this a “once in a lifetime” opportunity, one that Canadians seem keen to experience vicariously. The video has been viewed thousands of times, and his original post has more than 1,300 shares.