Tag Archives: buffalo

What To Watch For In Yellowstone

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So many of you when you’re walking through Yellowstone, are looking down at your feet aren’t you? I know you do, don’t deny it, I see you. You’re probably looking for snakes, right? Well there are very few snakes in Yellowstone. Hardly any. And the few that are there are more worried about being stepped on by a buffalo then they are by you. So they hide. Snakes are good hiders. You’re not going to see one.

What you really should be worried about is bears. Bears in trees to be more specific. Because they get in them. You should be looking up, way up, that’s where the bears are. They go up there for a lot of reasons. They like it up there, they did it when they were kids and it feels good, there’s stuff to eat if they get in the right tree, pine cones, bugs, leaves sometimes, and many times they’ve made friends with some birds and they go up just to visit. Usually bears go in trees for simple pleasant reasons.

But sometimes, and you can never tell when, you’ll find that there are bears up there that aren’t up there for altruistic reasons. They are ones that have gone up there for all the wrong reasons. These are the ones that had trouble in school, ran with the wrong crowd, started smoking and drinking at an early age, probably were promiscuous, had problems with abandonment issues, always blaming everything on their moms who left them when they were two. We call them “Bad Bears”. These are the one you should watch out for, why you should be looking up instead of walking around staring at your feet.

These are the bears that will suddenly but unexpectedly drop out of trees and eat your lunch. Don’t scoff, it could happen and it does. I have a hat that is full of bite marks from bears dropping out of trees and being upset that I don’t carry a lunch, take it out on me and my hat by biting it until it is almost ruint, and it’s a Tilley. It was expensive.

So I’m hoping you’ll take my warning seriously, I know many of you won’t, thinking this is just me pulling your leg, but don’t come whining around here when a bears drops out of a tree and does something mean to you. I tried to warn you. For those of you who are serious and pay attention to warnings, like those really annoying ones from Public Radio where that obnoxious horn bellows at you and they say “This is a test, if a real catastrophe had happened you’d of kissed your butt goodbye way before this message was over….” etc., then you’ll take heed and will make an effort to walk around looking up in the trees instead of at your feet.

You need to watch for those the signs that say “Be Bear Aware!” they didn’t just put them there for your amusement. They’re there for the same reason that deer crossing signs are where they are.  A deer has been killed there and they figure it will happen again. So if you see one those “Be Bear Aware!” signs stop immediately, and look up even if there’s no trees around, it’s good practice. Many times you’ll be glad you did. Just be careful you don’t trip over that snake laying there across the path.

Dreams

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I dream of many things. Walking through a pine forest, stepping carefully on each shadow so I don’t break the sunbeams dappling the forest floor. Stopping, listening, is that just the wind, or is it an elk cow brushing against the pine boughs as she secretly returns to her calf. I dream of finding the choke cherries along the Gibbon river ripe enough to eat and there are many of them. I dream of these things and more. I dream of the fierce joy of killing a buffalo, feeling it become still under my claws, eating it, eating as much as I can hold, then resting to eat even more.

I dream of warm, sun filled days where I stand chest deep in fresh green grass, feeling the earth soft beneath me, perfect for digging out marmots and ground squirrels, perfect for leaving my tracks on the rich dark earth. I stand and smell the scents of all the others around me, the elk in the aspens upriver, the wolves cleaning up the remains of their last kill, the scent of those strange beings that always seem to find me no matter how I hide. I smell the sharp heavy distinctive odor of another male, one I haven’t met before. I remember it as I will probably have to fight him. And I smell the pure cool air of the wind itself, it tells me where I am, who I am.

I dream of the female I have mated with the last two seasons. I dream of her fierceness, her strength, the feel of her razor-sharp claws on my side when I first approach her when she is undecided and uncertain. The summer is passing and it’s time to find her again. I dream of the high snow-covered ridges where I must find a place to rest through the cold months, I dream of being fat, heavy with enough energy stored within me so that I wake in the spring. Sometimes I dream of another small one, just like me, that I wrestle with and race across the meadow to find our mother so we can drink and sleep and play again, but those are hazy dreams, indistinct and shadowy. I dream those less and less as time goes on.

This is a good day to sleep, the warm sun on my back fills me with comfort. I will wake in a while but for now I dream, I dream, I dream.

Blue Buffalo Series # 3

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The camera likes blue. if you walk around at night and see people’s TV sets on, almost always the screen will appear blue. There is some technical reason for this that has to do with cathode tubes and the matrix of the phosphorus coating on the TV’s backside and the fact that the guy who invented TV was really into blue. He didn’t like any other color. A lot of the stuff that is inside TVs is now inside modern cameras. So ergo, cameras like blue too.

There was also that big censorship thing back in the 1950’s about “blue movies” being shown on TV. Since all the so-called blue movies were actually shot using blue light, hence the name, if they are projected onto a blue background they become invisible and good people wouldn’t be able to see anything the bad people were doing.  Blue on blue is just blue. So if you were watching TV back then you probably saw some of those blue movies and didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until the crazy 60’s that other colors of lights were added so now you can see everything. Boy, did that make the censors nervous.

Nature is kind of into blue too. If you go outside at dusk and I highly recommend that you do, you will notice the sky gets like, really super blue just before it goes dark. After exhaustive study we have found that the warmer colors, your reds, your yellows, your ambers and Atomic Tangerines are not what they call ‘mature’ colors yet. They’re still young colors in a cosmic sense, and as such are not allowed to stay up as late as the more mature colors like your indigo’s and your blues and purples. Consequently as the day ends the warmer colors of the spectrum are sent off to bed, usually with a large amount of hollering and screaming. If you see one of those incredibly vivid sunsets where there is this phenomenal explosion of colors, all in the warmer tones, reds, oranges, scarlet etc., that’s just the kids throwing a tantrum and making a scene before they go to bed. It is best just to let them get it out of their system and then send them packing.

Up in Yellowstone it’s the same thing. They don’t get any special considerations up there just because they’re a National park. Come dusk, the younger kids are sent off to bed and the light turns blue. Here are some buffalo getting ready to call it a night. The mother is taking her two kids across the river just as the last blue light is falling, to a spot where they can bed down. The kids are balky, straggling along, they know this means bedtime and like all kids it doesn’t sit well with them because they’re not tired. Even though the kid right behind mom is so beat he may not make it across the river before he goes out.

You may not have even known anything about this whole blue light deal but now you know everything there is to know about blue light and its effect on people. So if you have trouble getting your kids to bed just turn out all the red and yellow and other warm colored lights and pretty soon the kids will be zonked. This is Blue Buffalo Series # 3.

Buffalo Jokes

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So………Two blondes are standing on opposites sides of a lake. One cups her mouth and shouts across to the other: “Hey! How do I get to the other side of the lake?” A pause. The other blonde answers, “You ARE on the other side of the lake.”

Quiet Times

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Buffalo herd Lamar River Yellowstone

It is scenes like this that draw me back to Yellowstone year after year. A small group of buffalo are spending some quiet time browsing and resting by some snags next to the river. The trees, either damaged by the 1988 fires or simply died off as they do, make perfect scratching posts. Their long shaggy winter coats are mostly gone, but it feels good to scratch just for the sheer enjoyment of it. It won’t be long before the winds of winter blow these standing dead pines down and the herd will move along the river until they find a new bunch.

Buffalo like to stand in quiet water and you can see them in there for hours. They seem unfazed by the cold water, and it is cold after coming down out of the Absaroka mountains, fed by springs and melting snow. It’s a little later in the summer as you can see by the size and color of the calves in the herd, no new-born red ones in this bunch. The rut hasn’t started yet, everybody is eating their fill because they know that as pleasant as the weather is today, winter is waiting up in the snow-covered tops of the Absaroka mountains. Soon it will sweep down in all its fury and make life much less idyllic.

Right now though, everyone is taking a break and making use of an infrequent event, quiet time.

Not The Sharpest Knife In The Drawer

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Sharpest Knife0943Buffalo Herd Spring Storm Yellowstone

Now as we look at the current graduating class at Yellowstone we are not staring at the class valedictorians here. Buffalo aren’t the most academic members of the animal kingdom. You will rarely see them doing calculus like the wolves do, or building particle accelerators like the grizzlies, they prefer instead to utilize their time banging their heads together and grunting, or eating grass. Eating grass is probably one of their highest achievements and they have produced some prodigious grass eaters. Which is also why they weigh 2000 lbs.

Scientists have found that there is a reason that buffalo are not as astute as some of their other animal neighbors and it has to do with the head butting activity we spoke of earlier. It is also the reason their heads are so big. It seems that the repeated whacking  together of their heads has caused them to swell up and add padding and bone to the front of their face until they have this giant huge big head. It is natures’ way of protecting a species that is too dim to do it themselves. The other manifestation of this behavior is that their brains get ping-ponged back and forth in that huge cavity and gradually get compressed until they’re roughly the size of a walnut. This new tinier more compact  brain is also encased in a substance rather like jello that acts as a shock absorber and also keeps any intelligent thought from escaping out into the open, kind of like fundamentalists. This causes them to make decisions we can not understand.

Such as the one above. A spring snow storm has blown down out of the north, its freezing, they have little ones and what do they do? They rush to the nearest pond filled with ice-cold water and stand in it. They don’t gather around a fire in a meadow somewhere and sing folk songs like ‘buffalo gals’ or ‘It’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight’, or check into the Buffalo Hilton and have some hay sent up, they head straight for the one place that will make their miserable circumstances worse.

Even the smallest of the herd, the ones whose heads haven’t been deformed and still have a brain that is a normal size know that this isn’t right and attempt to head for someplace that isn’t as totally miserable as this. Unfortunately there isn’t any. It’s like this for as far as the eye can see. Which isn’t very far in this case as it is snowing and will snow harder before this is over. The one thing the small ones can be thankful for is that the brains of this outfit couldn’t find any deeper water to stand in or else you know they’d be there. This is truly a case of one herd left behind and the results are as predicted. You don’t study and do good in school and you’re going to be standing in butt deep freezing water. In a snow storm. Stay in school. And don’t do crack.

Hump Day

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HumpDay2562Buffalo bull – Soda Butte – Yellowstone     click to enlarge

I rarely wait for images to happen. Let me rephrase that, I rarely wait for imagined images to happen. Now if I’m shooting a grizzly and he’s just laying there not doing anything I’ll wait all day for him to wake his lazy butt up and do something. Bird in the hand kind of thing. But to go somewhere and think, I bet a buffalo bull will walk by this spot and line up perfectly with the other shapes in the image, well, I don’t do that.

But on this day I stopped because there was a snow squall moving through the Lamar valley out near Soda Butte and I wanted to get a shot of it. I noticed that the Soda butte formation lined up with the mountain in the background and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if a buffalo bull walked by and all three humps lined up.

As luck would have it there were buffalo in the background but they were way off and it didn’t look like anything was going to happen so I began packing up. Then I noticed that a few were starting to move my way. Then some more. I thought no way. There isn’t a chance that they were going to walk clear over here and then line up. That only happens in movies and the occasional blog posting.

But soon that’s exactly what happened. Only the ones that walked in the right place were small cows and yearlings, the big bulls seemed to understand what I wanted so they immediately took an alternate route, never coming closer that a hundred yards of the spot. Buffalo after buffalo walked by perfectly aligned but the shot I wanted was of one of the big bulls with his massive hump placed directly in front of Soda butte and the mountain behind so the three humps as it were, lined up for the image I wanted.

To shorten the story because I know you’ve got more important things to do, finally, finally after waiting through at least three different herds I was about to give up. I began tearing down and packing up again when I noticed this one last bull making his way towards me. Just slightly below the Soda butte formation is a steep rise they needed to climb if they were going to walk in front of the rock formation, and at that point there was a fork in the trail. If you took one side of the fork, the right side, they walked in front of Soda butte and if you took the other, the wrong side, they walked around behind me and had no chance of being in the shot. All the cows and calves had taken the ‘right’ fork, the bulls, everyone of them, had taken the ‘wrong’ fork. This is nature’s response to the “best laid plans of mice and men, oft time go awry* ” line used by everyone from Burns and Steinbeck and now the buffalo, to educate you about the futility of trying to influence Nature.

The bull stopped at the fork and seemed to consider things for several moments then took the right fork of the trail that put him exactly where he needed to be. Out of a couple of hundred buffalo that walked past me that afternoon he was the only bull to walk where he needed to and in doing so, present this image to me. I have a plaque in my office commemorating the event and I have placed him in my will. It only took 4½ hours of frustration to get exactly two images of him in the perfect place. This is why I don’t wait for imagined images. I just got sucked in to the situation, kind of like playing the dollar slots in Vegas. You know it’s going to hit with the next dollar and you play until you’re hitchhiking home.

4½ hours and two images. I guess it was time well spent, getting snowed on, feet and hands freezing, taking the buffalo’s name in vain because they wouldn’t do what I wanted them to, torn between walking away and giving it that last shot, so to speak, but I’m glad I stayed. This is one of my favorite images. I hope you enjoy it as well.

* I know that the original phrase is “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley ” as used in the original Robert Burns poem, but there are only three people in the western speaking world that know what the hell “Gang aft agley” means and I’m not one of them. So I used the more familiar usage.