Tag: mammoth

Other Mammal

Mountain Goat, Yellowstone National Park

Photo of mountain goat.
Billy Goat, Golden Gate Area

I haven’t been blogging much in the past year.  There have been two reasons.  The first reason was the constant theft of my images. The second reason was that I was growing a bit tired of feeling pressured to post something on a regular basis.  So, I let things slide.  I did go back and put a big copyright symbol on the photos that I had previously posted, but that didn’t leave me feeling all that satisfied about the theft problem because the big copyright symbol made the photos look pretty bad.  I’ve changed that to what you see here.  Maybe I’ll be more happy with this copyright style as time goes by.  I say “as time goes by” because I’m feeling a little more enthused about getting back to blogging.

One reason I’m enthused is that I just spent a month in Yellowstone.  Spring is my favorite time there because of all the baby animals.  I think this was the most successful spring trip I’ve had there.  One of the high points was seeing mountain goats in an area where I had never seen them before, and, more important, at distances that made photographing them feasible.  The area I’m speaking of is the Golden Gate.  It’s called the Golden Gate because of the color of the rocks.  If you aren’t familiar with where the Golden Gate is, it’s the canyon area you drive through just before you reach Swan Lake Flat (when driving from Mammoth).

I saw and photographed a nice looking (full winter coat) nanny and her kid on two different days and then this billy at a later time.  Telling mountain goat males from females is not all that easy.  The horns are a way to identify male from females, but with goats it’s not real easy because there’s not a big difference in size between the horns of a billy and a nanny.  The horns of billy goats are much thicker at the base and more curved than are the horns of nannies and, in frontal views, the horns look like they are spaced very close together with the males.

Photo of a billy (male) mountain goat.
Billy or Nanny?

The males also have a shoulder hump.  Based on the thickness of the horns at the base, the curve of the horns and the shoulder hump, I think this is a billy.  He is also in the early stages of molting.  He will soon have a much shorter summer coat.  One of the things I like about mountain goats is that they often assume stances as though they’ve been posed by the photographer.

The Park Service says mountain goats are not native to Yellowstone, but the result of the introduction of mountain goats by the State of Montana in the 1940s and 1950s which became established in the northern portions of the park in the 1990s.  The Park Service also says they may be having a negative effect on bighorn sheep.  The Park Service is doing research now with other agencies on mountain goat ecology and to determine the effect of the goats on bighorn sheep.

Pronghorn

Where to See Pronghorns in Yellowstone National Park

Photo of pronghorn.
A pronghorn buck walks along a ridge in the Slough Creek Area.

Yellowstone has 200 to 300 pronghorns.  They only exist in the Park in its northern range.  They spend winters in the Gardiner Basin and some, but not all, migrate from there to spend summers at higher elevations in the Park as far as the Lamar Valley.

One way to see them is to drive the Old Yellowstone Trail in the Gardiner Basin.  Start at the Park’s Roosevelt Arch and drive north around the west side of the Gardiner school and then continue on the gravel road until you get to the boat launch just before the bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River.  At that point you can either turn around and head back the way you came or you can cross the bridge, get on Highway 89,  and drive at highway speed back to Gardiner.  Pronghorn are here year round.  Note to photographers:  For most of this route the land looks to be in bad shape vegetation-wise, but gets better at the north end.  By the way, when you get back to the Roosevelt Arch look for pronghorn in that half mile or so between the Arch and the entrance booth.

The other option is to head for the Lamar Valley and look for them any place between Mammoth and the Lamar Valley that has open terrain.  I usually take a detour and drive the road to the Slough Creek Campground because I often see a few pronghorn there.  By the time you get to the confluence where Soda Butte Creek joins the Lamar River you will have covered about all the pronghorn habitat that can be seen from a vehicle.   The area from Mammoth to the Lamar Valley is summer range only.

Rocky Mountain Elk

Nervous Cow Elk, Yellowstone National Park

Photo of a cow elk.
“Nervous Nellie”

As I was driving from Mammoth to Tower shortly after sunrise one morning I spotted this lone cow elk looking at me.  She seemed very nervous.  She looks like she may be pregnant and I assume she was close to giving birth.  When cow elk are close to giving birth they go off by themselves for the birthing.    The calf is kept hidden for about a week.  The cow moves her calf (or calves) several times a day during that seven days and they stay motionless until their mom comes back to feed and move them.  Even so, predators find a lot of them.

The lighting was very bad for this photo.  You can see from the rim lighting around the elk’s body that the sun was coming from behind it.  The number one rule in outdoor photography is keep the sun at your back.  Well, you can’t always follow the rules in wildlife photography.  Elk aren’t models you can move around.  I did what I could at the time which was to compensate some by overexposing a bit and then compensated some more in Photoshop.  In the film days one could do, or attempt to do, the same thing in printing by dodging and burning, but the methods then were somewhat crude compared to what Photoshop allows one to do to mitigate exposure problems.   In this case I used the adjustment brush in Adobe Camera Raw to lighten the face and neck and then further refined the lighting/exposure using Shadows/Highlights and Curves.

Photo of underexposed elk.
Backlit Cow Elk

Here is what the image would have looked like, but for the adjustments described above in camera and Photoshop.  (The other difference from the top image is that I didn’t bother to crop this image.)