Tag: park service

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.

Osprey

Baling Twine, Point Reyes National Seashore

Photo of some discarded baling twine which is dangerous to wildlife.
Dangerous to Wildlife

A few days ago I wrote about the dangers of baling twine to ospreys.  This is what it looks like up close.  I found it on the edge of the road on the way to the turnoff for Chimney Rock.  I picked it up to properly dispose of it, but I took some photos first.  It’s made of plastic and seems light as a feather.  Given that it is used and has been coiled up, someone probably picked it up from a field and intended to dispose of it properly, but lost if from the back of a truck.  It looks like there are about three or four separate pieces of twine.

It was interesting that I found it yesterday morning because I planned to go out Limantour Road to check on something and on the way I intended to check on some osprey nests in a canyon that runs up to the road.   The two nests I had in mind were there and there was an osprey in each nest when I arrived.  I spotted a nest farther out that also had an osprey in it.  The osprey in the closest nest took off shortly after I parked my car in the little pull out.

Photo of an osprey nest in Point Reyes National Seashore
No Baling Twine

This is the closest nest.  It’s about 75 to 100 yards from where I parked.  The other nests are even farther away.   There didn’t seem to be any young in the nests.  I didn’t see any baling twine in them either, which was good.  The nests are not very close to the ranching areas of Point Reyes which lessens the chance that twine would get into them.  Plus,  I assume the Park Service has made an effort to educate the ranchers to the potential dangers of leaving twine in the fields if they didn’t know of the dangers already.

Update:  after I drafted this post I went out to my car and pulled the stuff apart.  There were five equal lengths.  Each was roughly 20 feet long.  It cuts easily using  a scissors.  It was very hard to cut with a box cutter.  I gathered each piece so it was four strands wide and then cut it across five times so I ended up with roughly foot-long strands.  It didn’t take long.  I then put all the pieces into a medium size plastic bag which I tied at the top.  The bag could have held several times more twine.  If the bag winds up on the top of a landfill it shouldn’t pose a potential risk.  I think if I were a rancher and had lots to get rid of I’d maybe skip the cutting and put it in large bags that were sealed closed.  There may be ways to re-cycle it as well.

If you come across any of this stuff please pick it up and dispose of it properly.

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.