Tag: yellowstone national park

Bighorn

Bighorn Ewe and Newborn Lamb, Yellowstone National Park

Photo of a bighorn ewe and new-born lamb.
Bighorn Ewe and New-born Lamb

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.

Photo of bighorn ewe and new-born lamb.
Bighorn Ewe and Lamb

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?

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.

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Happy Red Dog

A very young bison calf enjoys a run.
Bison Calf, Yellowstone National Park

This bison calf looks like it is smiling as it runs off some pent-up energy.  Bison are the first of the ungulates to give birth in Yellowstone.  Bison management in Yellowstone is difficult and controversial.  Some of them migrate north out of the park in winter looking for forage. That puts ts them in the crosshairs of the State of Montana which feels the brucellosis some of them carry will infect livestock.  The most common management solution is to shoot them.

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Killing Black Bears and Selling Their Gall Bladders

Photo of mother black bear.
Black Bear, Yellowstone National Park

Recently I wrote that the elk are dropping their antlers in Point Reyes National Seashore and the Park Service is busy picking up the antlers before the antler traders find them and remove them (which is illegal).  I mentioned that while bad enough, at least the antler thieves don’t kill the elk for the body parts as happens with animals such as bears, tigers and elephants.  The next day I opened my local paper to learn that someone in my city, which is located not more than 30 miles from San Francisco, was arrested while poaching a black bear in the Mendocino National Forest.  More black bear parts, namely a head, five paws, a penis and gall bladder, were in his freezer at home.  According to the article, black bear gall bladders sell for $5,000 on the black market.  A bad as these killings are, the real problem is the demand by some in the Asian community for bear and tiger parts for their supposed value as aphrodisiacs.  Tigers are nearing extinction due to this demand.  I wonder if there has ever been any study to support or refute this belief.