This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
I photographed this ram near the Yellowstone River picnic area on the road to Cooke City. This area and the area where the last photo of the lamb was shot, the Gardner River Canyon, are two of the best places in the park to see bighorn sheep.
My favorite time to be in Yellowstone is the spring. Why? The babies. One of the reasons I like them is that they are so full of life. They run around and jump in the air just for the joy of it. The ones that run and jump the best are the bighorn lambs. And they do it on steep terrain. Most herbivore babies are kept in hiding for the first couple of weeks until they can keep up with their moms. Not lambs. It is reported that they climb as well as their mothers when they are only one day old. I guess that lamb in the last post walked out of there the next day.
Notice how well this little lamb blends into its habitat.
I took this photo a year ago. I’m posting it to show where this ewe gave birth. As you can see, the ground is fairly steep and the surface is made up of a lot of small rocks that have eroded away from above. Much of it will eventually wind up at the bottom of the canyon. The lamb has yet to stand up, although it has tried several times. They were on the east side of the Yellowstone River Canyon and I was on the west side. I shot this scene using a 500mm lens with a 2x tele-converter on a Canon 7D camera. That adds up to 1600mm or 32 power. The photo is also cropped a bit. I would guess that I was 200-300 yards away. Now, what I really want to show you is the next photo.
This photo was taken with a full frame sensor camera and a 100-400mm lens at 100mm. That would be 2 power. Can you spot them? From left to right they are just about centered. From top to bottom they are about 65% from the top. I’d say the lamb is safe from predators there, with the possible exception of eagles, but at some point they are going to have to walk out of there. What route would you take?
I started this photo blog a little over a year ago in Yellowstone. I thought then that it would be a good time to start the blog because I would have, hopefully, a lot of images to get the blog going. As it turned out I got more images than I could deal with. By the time I got all the images downloaded each night it was 11:00 pm and I wanted to be back in the park by sunrise. No problem I thought. I’ll post the Yellowstone images on the blog when I get home. I was going to do that to some degree anyway.
As it turned out, when I got home I started going to nearby Point Reyes National Seashore and, to my surprise, there were enough wildlife photo opportunities at Point Reyes that I never did post much of last spring in Yellowstone. I cancelled my trip this spring which would have been my third spring trip in a row. I started posting images of spring in Yellowstone a week ago without much thought about it. I guess I missed being there. I think I’ll continue for a while.
This cinnamon black bear was a regular outside the northeast entrance last spring. I don’t know where the boundary is between Park Service land and Forest Service land. To me, he’s a Yellowstone bear.
This calf was seen very close to the road just north of Yellowstone National Park. For the first couple of weeks after birth elk calves stay hidden like this for much of the time. If they don’t move they are hard to spot. Grizzlies are known to run grid patterns through elk calving grounds until one panics and tries to run.
This photo looks a bit different than the other elk photos I’ve been posting doesn’t it? The elk don’t look much different even though these are Rocky Mountain Elk, not Tule elk. It’s the habitat. This photo was taken in Yellowstone National Park about a mile north of Mammoth.
This is a good time to be in Yellowstone to see bear cubs. While I enjoy photographing all cubs, the spring cubs, also known as cubs of the year, or “COYs,” are the cutest. Spring cubs are tiny. How tiny? I think of them as footballs with legs.
