Tag Archives: calves

September Along the Madison

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Sunlit Grass – Cow Elk – Along the Madison River – Yellowstone

September in Yellowstone Park is a special time of the year, especially early September. The Rut is still some weeks away yet, the calves are big enough that they’re basically taking care of themselves, and during the hot afternoons the wolves are usually sleeping back at their dens waiting for the cool of the evening before setting out to see what bounty is available. It’s a rare moment for the cows to take a little time for themselves.

This particular cow had found a spot on a small island in the middle of the Madison river and taking advantage of the tall, golden grass covering it, has settled down for some time in the sun. A haven of relative safety she can let her guard down slightly in a rare moment of solitude. The heat of the afternoon, the absence of any breeze, the buzz of the occasional insect, plus the quiet murmuring of the river as it slowly made its way downstream was enough to allow her to recharge and get set for whatever Nature has in store for her. It’s September along the Madison.

Cowboys At Work Team Roping

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This post has been moved to OpenChutes.com. All future postings of Powwows, Indian Relay Races, Rodeos and Rendezvous will be posted there from now on exclusively. So if you’re looking for new images and posts for all those events attended this year, plus all the old posts posted on BigShotsNow.com check out OpenChutes.com. See you there!

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Team Roping, this is a rodeo event based on real life cowboy work, as are all the events in the rodeo except maybe bull riding. That event is just something cowboys thought up for fun, something to do on a Friday night instead of going to the Punch Up, a shot and a beer and a fist fight establishment out on the county line.

Team roping was particularly important as it was the way cowboys completed the arduous task of handling calves during spring round-up so they could be collected, branded and other necessary activities performed on them. Calves being calves they had some idea of what that all entailed so they would do their best to avoid participating and run away. Especially the little bull calves. Cowboys having to get all this work accomplished had to come up with a way to capture the calf so it could be processed. That’s where team roping came in.

Cowboys on their horses would be hanging around the outside of the herd as it milled around inside the corral and when they saw a calf making a break for it, ride after it to catch it. Two cowboys usually worked together to do this. One cowboy, called a header, would rope the runaway calf or young steer around his horns, and the other cowboy called a heeler, would rope the calves hind feet. The calf unable to run would be secured by the two horses carefully backing up, until the calf was in the position it needed to be for the branding team to run up and tip the calf on its side, so the branding could take place. This was also the time that other necessary things would happen, inoculations, horn trimming if necessary, a short brief instruction session on how to be a proper productive member of the herd, normally delivered by one of the older cowboys, and the calf would be released back to the care of its mother or other proper guardian.

Today things are stilled handled pretty much the way they were 100 years ago. The cows and calves are rounded up, herded into a corral where the cowboys have built a small fire to heat up the branding irons and they go to work. It worked good back then and it still works good today. But we’ve heard that changes may be on the way.

It’s the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century and some things have changed from the 1800’s. We have iPads now, and cell phones, freeze-dried potatoes that you can just mix with hot water and have for lunch right there at the corral, and that and other digital stuff, changed everything. The word on the range is that soon drones will be flying in with their calf-seeking radar, picking up these calves, hauling them to an area where they are marked with organic recycled ink in place of the old style brand, be subcutaneously inoculated with growth hormones that will double the calves weight every 96 hours, make them mellow and not mean, and lastly, be injected with a personalized  “chip” that will give its location, weight gain over the past 96 hours, its current mood and disposition, whether it is currently being rustled, and provide it with all the necessary information it needs to be a calf in the 21st century.

Now we don’t know if any of that is true or not, it’s just some of the stuff cowboys talk about around the campfire at supper. It makes the time go by and the beans taste better. We do know that the Amalgamated Brotherhood of International Cowboys, (ABIC) the union most cowboys belong to, are definitely against it. We’ll just have to wait and see how all this plays out. For now though it’s business as usual out on the range and the team ropers have their work cut out for them and they’re hard at it.

If you want to see how real cowboys do their work then come down to the rodeo, and the Greeley Stampede is a good one to come to, and watch Team Roping. It’s very cool.

Ghosts In The Darkness

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Many people do not know this but buffalo do not emit light. They do not reflect light. In fact they absorb light. What one sees when one comes around a corner late at night is not the neon green eyes of the usual grass nibblers as you would if these were normal creatures, instead there is nothing, just a dark shape perhaps slightly darker than the surrounding light, a night-time shadow, a ghost in the darkness. They loom in the roadway, an almost formless mass that represents a 2000 lb. animal blocking your passage, somewhat irritated that you would be disturbing it as it goes about its life.

They also do not understand motor driven vehicles. This is not a proven fact yet but it appears that they do not see vehicles as a mechanical conveyance at all but simply as another large animal that needs to be confronted and dealt with. The Director has a large imprint, call it a dent if you must, in his old Dodge pickup,The Enola Gay, that was placed there by a bull who apparently didn’t like the color blue. That’s the only reason we can come up with that would explain why it would suddenly charge across the roadway and attempt to gore the Enola Gay to death. During circumstances such as these one doesn’t try to have meaningful dialogue with the enraged beast, there is no attempt made to explain that this is going to result in increased insurance premiums, body work, and some inconvenience, one simply drives away glad you were not the one with a big dent in your ass. They do not care that you may be weary and just want to get home after a long day of photographing them when they are visible. Note: Sunlight makes them visible and they are much easier to see so you don’t have problems seeing them during the daytime. But night, that’s a different story.

They wander through their lives completely oblivious to the needs and demands of humans. This is why they do what appears to be mind-boggling stupid things when you least expect it. Buffalo fall into the category of things and people that do not keep regular hours. This makes them unpredictable. They will leave waist-high grass, jump into the frigid water of the closest river, crossing it to eat the waist-high grass on the other side. They will stand placidly by the side of the road as you pass only to leap out into the road and stick their horn in your radiator the next time they see you. They will lie down in the middle of the road immediately around a hairpin corner because the asphalt is warm. Even going 45 mph, or less, the speed limit in most of the park, it is difficult to stop a vehicle on such short notice. Usually they will not even get up after nearly being struck. They require that you back up and go around them. One learns to drive very cautiously in buffalo territory.

Buffalo are travelers. They’re like Deadheads. One place is never good enough. They’re soon off to hear the next concert even if its exactly like the one they just heard. They have timetables that they do not share with the rest of the denizens of the park, human or otherwise. Migratory schedules that are important enough to them that they will set out at any time, cross any obstacles to get to a place that looks exactly like the place that they just left. That is what is happening in the picture above. This small herd was feeding on the new grass of the meadows in the Madison river canyon when the bell rang and they immediately started up the roadway through the Gibbon falls canyon to the lush meadows at the top of the pass. In the old days before macadam they had trails that they would walk in, single file, nose to tail like circus elephants but then humans came along and built them these wonderful wide flat trails that they could walk ten abreast on, and they use them. In fact they own them and only grudgingly share them if at all.

One has not lived until one has followed the herd the eight miles or so from the bottom of the Gibbon pass to the top where the Gibbon meadows are. Buffalo walk at about 2-3 miles per hour, less if they have calves along, and they always have calves along, so if you are fortunate enough to get behind the herd  be prepared to inch along behind it, carefully watching the temperature gauge on your dashboard, wallowing in the delightful scent of buffalo until they get to the top. Some people become so enraged by this that they blow their horns and try and push the herd by encroaching on their space. This is never a good idea. Buffalo can be very vindictive. Repair bills are the least of your problems if you try to impose your will on a buffalo herd. Just a word of warning.

This night everyone was lucky. There was a car in the lead full of people who had never seen a buffalo before even though they had been watching them all day, so traffic was at a crawl to begin with when everyone rounded the curve and came upon these ghostly travelers. You can get a small sense of the chaos involved when the cars slam on their brakes and the herd erupts into a darting frenzy, trying to make sense of what is occurring , protecting the wild-eyed calves, and maintaining their forward motion. This is a ‘good news’ photo as if you notice the direction we’re traveling and the direction the buffalo are moving, we will be through this buffalo jam as soon as they pass by us. The folks behind them traveling in the same direction however are in for a long night.

If you visit Yellowstone and you find yourself a long way from your lodging just relax, don’t try and race home, take your time, and be ever vigilant so you don’t meet the ghosts in the darkness.

Buffalo Spawn

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Boy oh boy oh boy are we here at *The Institute excited. It’s Spring and time for one of the greatest, if not the most unlikely, spectacles ever to occur in Nature. We’re talking about the Buffalo Spawn that happens every April along the Firehole river in Yellowstone National Park. This phenomenon was first discovered several years ago by one of our free range wildlife photographers working on a separate project in Yellowstone and we have been fortunate to document this amazing process ever since.

The Institute, as has been noted many times in the past, has many ongoing projects underway at all times and the one our photographer was working on at the time this spawning phenomenon was noted, was a study on why river banks are just wide enough to accommodate the water that flowed through them and no wider, when he noticed strange behavior in the buffalo herds. The buffalo began gathering at the riverside jostling and shoving each other until they began to frantically enter the water and begin moving up-stream. Sometimes singly or in pairs, cows and bulls alike struggled upstream against the current in a single-minded desire to reach the shallows at the headwaters of the river to begin their spawning.

No obstacle was too great to keep them from moving ever upstream, clamoring over rocks and boulders, leaping mightily up water falls, their coats and horns glistening in the sun as they swam exhaustedly against the raging current, struggling until they reached that final tributary where they had been created many years ago. There under the light of a full moon the cows released their eggs and the bulls their sperm and as the river slowly allowed fertilization the eggs containing the new buffalos began to tumble downstream through rapids and wide gentle bends until catching up against a snag lying across the  stream, or a pebble bed where they could sink into safety amongst the stones and germinate, the eggs rested, began to grow, and thereby begin a new generation of buffalo.

Life is never a sure thing here in Yellowstone and the eggs were at constant risk of being found and devoured by predators. Wolves hungry as only wolves can be searched constantly along the riverbanks looking for egg clusters that had attached to rocks or plants along the shore and finding them, greedily devoured them for the protein that future young buffalo calves could provide them while in their embryonic state.

 Grizzlies could be seen out in the middle of the river casually turning over great snags, the remains of giant trees that had fallen into the river to float downstream until they lodged themselves in the shallows and found a permanent home. Ripping the snags apart with their tremendously strong forearms and sharp claws, the egg clusters of the new buffalo generation were easy pickings for the mammoth beasts to find and consume.

But life always finds a way. And many of the eggs escaped detection and over time developed into their next phase of development which of course is the ‘buffpole’ stage where they began to grow their little hooves and tails and assume the shape we recognize as ‘Buffalo’. By now they had been fed steadily by the nutrients in the river and were beginning to break free from the egg sack that had enveloped them. If the light was just right these small fry could be seen forming little groups or herds, galloping from one place of safety in the water to another, gaining strength and nimbleness needed to leave the confines of the river and move on to land to begin their new lives as the Giants of the Plains, the buffalo.

Once established on land the new young buffalo, now known as ‘calves’, would be adopted by an adult female or ‘cow’ and be nursed and shown how to graze. They grew rapidly and were now totally independent of the river from which they formed. Yet you can still see some remnants of the behavior established in their early stages, such as when they gather in large groups or ‘herds’ and run thundering from one place to another for no apparent reason. This is a hold over from their schooling behavior when they were freshly formed fry in the river, and now it has become established as part of their genetic behavior on the land.

If you want to observe this spawning behavior of the buffalo you must hurry to Yellowstone because it doesn’t last long. Once it starts the buffalo are tireless in their obsession to get upstream and complete the spawning process that ensures that the new herd will be replenished. It is often over before you arrive, in fact if you are reading this now in May, you’ve already missed it. Sorry, but we can assure you that it does happen as proven by the huge number of buffalo seen grazing in the vast meadows of Yellowstone National park. After all where else could they have come from.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Yellowstone Halloween

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2013-10-31Halloween0939click to enlarge

Halloween is a special time for young buffalo in Yellowstone. Most of their days are scary enough but Halloween is extra scary because that’s when all the wolves dress up as buffalo calves and go play special tricks on the herd.

Since wolves are very good at making costumes and applying makeup they can sometimes look just like your little herd buddy until suddenly you’re the trick and they’ve gotten a treat.

Add some snow to the mix and you can’t tell who that is taking your best friend Iggy, for a walk into the woods. Best stay real close to Mom, at least you know she’s not a wolf in Buffalo’s clothing, Right?

CowLick

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CowLick6583click to enlarge

Socializing young elk is a full-time job for elk moms. Its late afternoon the kids are home from school and after snacks and some sprucing up its time to rejoin the herd for the evening get together. During the day the herd goes about its business with the cows finding out where the best new grass is, where the lazy no account bulls might be, and watching over the kids while they’re in school. There’s been some comments made about the length the recesses have stretched to since the cutbacks. It seems like they’ve been doing a lot more playing and a lot less studying, but since they’re only young once and for not very long at that, it’s ok. Mom will pick up the slack. Right now she wants to know how he got milkweed that far into his ear. His brother is taking full advantage of his siblings discomfort to get more than his share of the afternoon pick me up and it seems as if their daily activities aren’t much different from ours. I know my sister used to get milkweed in her ear and she turned out alright.

Birthin’ Babies

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Buffalo are a lot like other creatures that have babies, they’re just bigger is all, and because they are bigger you can’t always tell that they’re pregnant. Such was the case with this young cow that was soon to be a mother. Whenever I go to Yellowstone, as a creature of habit I have a tradition, or ritual, OK an obsession, where my very first picture has to be of a buffalo. They are the icon for me that represents Yellowstone and all the creatures and natural wonders that makes the park the unique place it is and what draws me back there year after year. As I entered the park from the western entrance and drove along the Madison river watching the herds I noticed a grouping of cows within but slightly separate from the main herd. I pulled off the road, got out and casually ran my lens over the slowly milling animals looking for one that might be my opening shot. Suddenly, without warning, the young cow near the center of the picture began to spin around and out popped a calf. It flew through the air and landed on the ground with a thud. The cows who seemed to be acting as mid-wives and had been keeping an eye on this expectant mother all stood stock still. I stood stock still. It could not have been more unexpected or had any greater impact on me had it happened at Westminster cathedral. I looked around at the other people standing near me and none of them had seen this. The miracle of birth that had just thudded to the ground in a wet pile went unnoticed by everyone but me and the buffalo mid-wives.
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It appears by her size and uncertainty that this may well have been this cows first calf. Buffalo breed when they are two years old and have their first calves when they are three. Instinct has taken over and she knows what to do, she just isn’t quite sure how to do it.
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Another even younger cow comes over trying to make sense of all this but just gets in the way confusing this new mother even more. First item of business is to get rid of the afterbirth which she handles very well and before long the brand new calf is clean as a whistle.
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Next on the agenda is to get him up so he can nurse and learn who his mother is. She is having a little trouble with this part and can’t quite figure out how to do it and winds up rolling him over several times.
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More of the older cows arrive and start to check out the new addition. The new mom is off to the left of the calf lying on the ground.
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Seeing the new calf struggling to get up brings more of the older cows nearer while the new mom still appears be bewildered by events. She hasn’t taken charge of the situation yet and looks on more as a spectator rather than the main participant.
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It is a struggle, to be sure, to find your footing when you don’t know how to do anything yet. His legs aren’t doing what he wants and he keeps falling over. At the top of the image a large older cow arrives and takes charge of what is rapidly becoming a chaotic situation.
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Meanwhile life goes on in the herd. Two bulls decide this meadow isn’t big enough for the both of them and attempt to settle things just a few feet away from the struggling new calf. In the background several elk cows are fording the Madison and up on the road the tourists are boarding their bus to go on to the next sight.
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More and more exhausted the young calf still struggles to get up. He needs to nurse to replace the lost energy spent coming into the world. The midwife greets the new arrival
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and with a few nudges quickly helps him to his feet. He mistakenly thinks she is mom but with several more gentle pushes she redirects him to his own mother and nature begins to take it’s course. His mother is standing directly behind the mature cow and you can see the difference in their sizes, as the new mother is almost invisible behind the larger cow.
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He quickly heads in the right direction and finding her is soon nursing. The midwife cow has her own calf to feed but she sticks around a little longer to make sure that everything is working right for the mother.
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As soon as he has drunk his fill the totally exhausted calf and the brand new mother take a much needed rest. The entire episode, from when the calf hit the ground until this first nap, was almost exactly fifteen minutes according to the time stamp on my camera. It doesn’t take long to get born in the Yellowstone.