Summer 2019

Sunday, May 5, 2019 Mammoth Campground, Yellowstone It's time to chase wolves and bears again. I plan to be here until Memorial Day weekend, so I'll try to get these out every 3 or 4 days. I drove up yesterday and got settled in the campground this morning. Then, I went out to see what was happening. The Junction Butte wolf pack have pups in the same den as last year. They haven't come out of the den, yet, but they are expected any day now. They were born between 1 and 2 weeks ago. There has been activity around the den, so we know there are pups. Further down, in the Lamar Valley was a bison carcass near the road. I got 2 videos – one of a pair of grizzlies feeding on it, a mother and her 2-year old cub. And just a few hundred feet away was a wolf, waiting it's turn: Later, I saw 4 moose, another grizzly bear and, back at the den later, 6 more wolves. Not a bad first day.

May 18, 2019 I'm home.  The weather got cold and wet, as predicted, so I decided I'd seen enough. I'm updating the posts with the videos and I found these. 

Thursday, May 15, 2019 Without pups in the Junction Butte pack den, wolves are hard to find now. You need a carcass to attract them. There is one in Little America that had a single wolf on it this morning, but a grizzly bear seems to own it and spent most of the day sleeping on it. I saw lots of distant bears and a few coyotes. Then at the east end of the Lamar Valley at a turnout called “Hitching Post”, because that's where the outfitters park their horse trailers, I saw this: That's a lot of cars. Looking out beyond the turnout, was this: That's a lot of photographers with big lenses. I parked and walked over to see what they were photographing and got this: A bedded down fox. When there are no wolves and the bears are a long way off and the bighorns and bison are ugly while shedding their winter coats, a fox will have to do. It did give me a 3-dog day – wolf, coyote and fox. The weather is supposed to t...

Wednesday, May 15, 2019 The tripod I use for my spotting scope finally died yesterday. It's a heavy steel tripod with a push-button type operation to extend and retract the legs. One of the legs will not retract. This has happened before and, after taking it apart at home, I was able to fix it, but parts had broken and it didn't extend automatically any more. You had to pull it out. Now it won't go back in. So, after more than 20 years of service, I decided it's time to replace it. They make a new version of this same tripod, so today I drove to Bozeman to see if any camera stores had one. No good. Nobody has it, so I'll have to order it when I get home. I have another tripod I can use until then. It's not as well suited for this job - it's a lot lighter, so it's not as steady and it has a bigger mounting plate that interferes with the gear head - but it works. In the meantime, I saw this moose early before I left:

Sunday, May 12, 2019 Mammoth Campground, Yellowstone This was an amazing day. I saw things I had read and heard about, but never seen. It starts with a bison carcass in the Lamar Valley. All morning we saw wolves on it: Then, all afternoon, we had a wolf that was trying to cross the road to get to the carcass, but was always blocked by cars. He passed within 100 yards of us several times: Finally, there was the orphan bison calf. We believe that the dead bison had a calf, and it was wandering up and down the valley, alone. Bison will not adopt orphans, so this calf was doomed. It couldn't eat grass, so it would either starve or be eaten by wolves or bears. It tuned out to be the latter – wolves. By 8:00 pm, I was ready to go back to camp, but my job this evening was to stay and report what happened. So I stayed. The wolf that had been trying to cross the road all day finally made it. He went to the carcass and fed for a while, an...

Saturday, May 11, 2019 Mammoth Campground, Yellowstone I've been trying to get fast enough internet to upload the videos for a few days, now. The best place in town with public internet fast enough is the Pharmacy, but they recently remodeled and don't have their wifi working yet. I'll keep trying, and, will try the hotel I use in winter. Maybe they'll let me buy some time during the day when no guests are there.