Tag: cinnamon black bear

Black Bear

Big Black Bear, Yellowstone National Park

Photo of large cinnamon black bear.
Big Boy

About the only negative to wildlife photography in Yellowstone is having to go through all your photos to separate the chaff from the wheat.  I shoot about 1,000 images a day and there is no time to go through them until I get home.  Going through 14,000 images is a daunting task.    I’ve started with black bears and I still have 1,800 black bear photos to delete or save.

This photo was taken at sunset at Phantom Lake using a 500mm lens and 1.4 tele-extender.  When shooting early and late in the day the delete rate goes up because it gets harder to stop subject movement.  This image was shot at 125th of a second at ISO 2,000.  I don’t like raising the ISO much above 800 but I had to go to 2000 to make sure I at least got some sharp photos of the animal standing still and, hopefully, moving as well.

Black Bear

A Black Bear Protects an Elk Carcass, Yellowstone National Park

Photo of cinnamon black bear lying on elk carcass.
“This one’s mine.”

The road over Dunraven Pass opened May 29.  I didn’t know the pass had been cleared until yesterday.  As I began the drive over it from Tower to Canyon I quickly saw a bunch of cars parked.  It turns out the day the pass opened some people found a wolf kill of an elk.  By the time I came along most of the carcass had been consumed and a cinnamon black bear was in possession of it.  One wolf came by and the bear was able to keep possession.  I proceeded over Dunraven Pass to Canyon and didn’t see anything of interest.

 

Spring Cubs at Play

Photo of two black bear spring cubs.
Spring Cubs at Play

In my previous post I overstated my case when I said bears were getting hard to find because they weren’t spending all their time feeding on grass, but were taking advantage of elk calving.  There isn’t an elk calf (or other prey species) around every turn for the bears so they haven’t completely stopped eating grass.  I photographed these cubs yesterday.  They were playing king of the hill while their mother grazed on grass.  I’m 99 per cent sure they’re the same cubs that were in an earlier blog because they are in  the same location.  I still haven’t seen an elk calf.  I also haven’t seen any badgers.  I’ve seen a lot of other critters though.  One thing I’m amazed at is how many mountain bluebirds I’ve seen and photographed.

Black Bear

Cinnamon Black Bear, Yellowstone National Park

Photo of cinnamon black bear.
A Hungry Bear

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.