Unlike animals with horns, those with antlers grow and then shed a new set every year. It was the end of May when I photographed this male elk in Yellowstone. His antlers will continue to grow throughout the summer and then in the fall, the velvet skin that you see here will be shed to reveal the hard bone like material underneath. The elk will retain these velvet-less antlers until they are eventually dropped altogether in the winter.
A bison walks along a shallow ridge line in Yellowstone National Park. This guy was taking his time catching up to the rest of the herd that had already descended to the far side of that small hill. Earlier a few had stopped to drink from the lake.
I didn’t post yesterday because I was stuck at the airport in Bangor, Maine due to bad weather. I went there to photograph puffins on Saturday morning and then drove up to Baxster State Park in search of moose. Unfortunately, it rained all day on Sunday and the moose were nowhere to be found. I decided to go for a hike anyway and just as I was about ready to give up and head for home, I stumbled across this little fawn. It must have been born the night before because I was in the exact same spot the previous evening and it wasn’t there. The mother wasn’t anywhere in sight, but hopefully was just hiding someplace nearby waiting for me to leave.
I didn’t see too many pronghorn on this most recent trip to Yellowstone, but there were a few out and about. In this photo, you can see the difference between the male and the female. The males have the prominent pronged horns whereas the females also have horns, but they are much smaller and often times barely visible.
This duck is called a Barrow’s goldeneye. It is a male of the species — the female having a more brownish head and lacking the white patch on the side of the face. You can’t really tell due to the limited depth of field, but that’s the Grand Teton mountain range in the background.
There were bison with newborn calves all over the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone. This youngster was getting a nice eye bath from its mother.
Bison, elk, pronghorn and bighorn are all having their babies this time of year in Yellowstone. The bighorn rams were especially fun to watch as they sprinted and jumped and defied gravity on the steep walls of Gardiner Canyon.
Due to the weather in Yellowstone, I decided to drive three hours south to Grand Teton National Park. The weather there was much better — for about an hour. This is an elk, probably wondering what happened to Springtime.
There were a ton of bear sightings this weekend in Yellowstone, both brown (grizzly) and black, although it was often difficult to get shots with the huge crowds of people. This one is a black bear, although its coat is more the color of a grizzly. Black bears can be everything from blondish to almost pure black. The bear had wandered into the little town of Mammoth — which is within the park near the northwest entrance — apparently dragging a young elk kill. For the majority of the afternoon, the bear slept off the feast, obscured from view behind a tree which was behind a park administrative building. People had been set up with tripods and cameras for hours waiting for the bear to move and come into view. I decided to leave the crowd and circle back later. When I returned there was no one around so I figured the bear was gone, but then I saw its paw peaking out from behind the tree. A few minutes later it got up and moved into an open area on the other side of the building. I got low, onto the ground, for this shot, which isn’t always a good idea with bears because it signals to them that you are submissive and perhaps taste good. I felt pretty safe, however, being near my car, and by the time I took the  shot there were a few other people around. As you can see though, the bear was looking at me pretty intensely and this is just before it got up and took about five steps toward me before turning around again and heading back to the elk. From its position behind the tree it looked like a pretty small bear, but when I saw it in the open I realized it was actually quite big.
