Tag Archives: grizzlies

It’s A New Day

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Around about the first Week in June the cow elk head up into the high brush to drop their calves. They leave the protection of the herd to individually find that spot they picked out for this years birthing. Many births results in twins and the cow stays up in her protected place until the calves are big enough and are ready to head down and rejoin the herd.

As this is a favorite time for the grizzlies and wolves to seek out the newborn calves, hiding means saving many of the calves from becoming dinner for the hungry predators. Nature in its own inscrutable way provides many checks and balances. Replenishing the herds on one hand and on the other side providing sustenance for the predators. All designed to keep things on an even keel.

Today however, it’s a new day and the family heads on down into the valley and meadows to join the other new additions to seek safety in the herd by adding to its numbers, thereby raising the odds of keeping the newborns safe. Her strategy worked this time by keeping her calves well hidden from danger and now it’s up to luck and the caprice of nature as to what happens next.

Practising

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As Fall closes in on us all the animals in the park are preparing for the winter. For some like the Yellow-bellied Marmot this means gathering all the grass that it can stuff in its burrow. If you’re a buffalo not only do you stuff your big fat face with all the grass and foliage that you can, you also grow a thick mat of hair all over your body and especially on your face. This will allow you to push that face into the snow over and over again looking for that old frozen grass and not freeze your nostrils off.

Birds for the most part, being infinitely smarter than other animals just bail as soon they notice the cold and head for places that are warm. Miami, Rio, South Texas. They don’t bother with all that extra feeding. It’s hard to fly if you’re a 15 lb. Bluebird, so they opt for dining lightly on the trip south.We could go on and on about all the idiosyncrasies of the different animals preparing for winter but you all have cable, you watch the Animal Planet so you’re pretty aware of all the preparations they make.

What you may not know however is the huge amount of prep and practice that goes into the bears preparation for wintering over in Yellowstone. Especially grizzlies. Yes, you know about going in the cave, sleeping, then doing that some more until winters over and it’s safe to come out. But what you don’t know is how difficult it is for a naturally active grizzly bear to just go into that cave and go to sleep and stay that way for like six months or more sometimes.

He’s just had a very full summer of dashing around eating Elk calves, tearing the lids off of garbage cans, biting the occasional tourist, fighting with other grizzly bears, thinking bear thoughts, leaving bear tracks along the lake’s edge for tourists to find so they can see how big he is, having to deal with those pesky wolves, getting the occasional ear tag for some infraction or other. It’s a lot of work being a grizzly and along about November or even late October they have to go to bed again. Except they’re really amped. They are pumped up from the busy summer and sleep is the last thing on their minds.

They’re thinking about all the cool stuff they got away with this summer, pulling the door off that camping trailer, hooking up with that hot little female, running off before the rangers could shoot it with those rubber bullets. There’s no way it’s going to sleep.

But sleep it must. They can’t be up and goofing around during the winter, that’s not how this whole bear thing works. It’s designed for the bear to sleep for the winter or else everything just goes all wonky and we can’t have that. After an exhaustive study to see how these grizzly bears handle this problem it was found that they have developed a pretty inventive solution to it. They practice sleeping. That’s it. Just practice. Every chance they get, like after a great big meal of freshly killed buffalo for instance, they just crap out along side the carcass and sleep for as long as they can. That’s what this guy in the picture above is doing. You can’t see the carcass because he’s sprawled on top of it to keep the magpies and ravens from getting it. In a while he’ll wake up and eat some more, then go back to sleep again and will repeat this maneuver until he’s got the ability to got to sleep at the drop of a shinbone. This repetition of eating and sleeping gets his weight up to about eight hundred plus pounds or so, kind of like when we eat that Family size, Papa’s Favorite Pizza from Papa Murphy’s with extra red sauce and cheese at 2:30 in the morning and wake up later unable to fit our shoes on.

This is how they get all the sleep experience they require to stay asleep for months. This is also the time they perfect their dreaming skills. To see what they dream about check out this previous post http://www.bigshotsnow.com/2014/11/09/ and it will tell you all you need to know about Bear dreams. It won’t be long now before all that practice will be put to good use. The leaves will fall, the winds turn cold, and the long trek up the mountain to enter the cave he has used for the last six years will begin. Fortunately the bear has prepared himself well and as soon as he gets settled in and gets all turned around just right with his nose pointed toward the entrance, he will do that thing he does to cause him to fall asleep and that’s it. He’s in for the duration. He’ll sleep until the first trickle of melting snow runs down his back. Then he’ll be up and at it again. Nature has come full circle.

Road Trip

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Every once in a while we take a chance here at The Institute and do something really nice for our employees. This year we shut The Institute down completely for the entire holiday season, banked the fires, put the computers in standby, turned off the electricity to the fence, turned our livestock loose to fend for themselves, gave all of our interns a bus ticket to the last place they remember being from and The Institute went into hibernation until the New Year’s bells rang.

Now we are ramping up again. Everyone is slowly trickling back from where ever they spent the holidays. Just yesterday the bright, shiny, baby blue bus that the Sheriff’s department uses to transport prisoners hither and yon, hither being County road 56G where they cheerfully spread blacktop for the entire fortnight of the holidays, and yon, back to the tent city up near the Soapstone Wildlife Preserve where they ate sagebrush and tried not to freeze to death, dropped off the interns and two of our PhD’s that had spent the Christmas holidays in the bosom of the Larimer County Work but not release program.

Fortunately our critical employees like our chef returned a day early to get the fires built back up again. Of course he returned because we kept the back seat out of his 1968 Buick Boattail Riviera as an incentive to come back. You can not find replacements for those anywhere, I don’t care if you look on Craigslist, eBay, AutoZone, or any junkyard from here to the Philippines, they’re just not available. It’s good to see that coal-black smoke roiling out of the commissaries chimneys again. It won’t be long before the scent of coal fires and Lamprey stew and frozen dinners will coat the buildings with a thin layer of grease again. I know some of our interns cannot wait. Which is good because they’ve already chewed so much bark off the aspen I don’t know what the elk are going to eat this winter,

Our Chief of Security was also an early returnee. She had to put new brushes in the generator that keeps the fence electrified and to test fire the AR-15’s that were stored in the gun locker. Plus she just likes shooting stuff and it’s difficult to find a place where you can discharge automatic weapons with impunity. Our med staff came back because there would be a lot of cases to treat amongst the returning interns due to their living rough as they call it. Rashes, bites, broken teeth, infected tattoos, malnutrition, loss of key parts of their bodies from unknown incidents, bruises from manacles and restraints, loss of body hair from attending New Year’s parties, colds, hypo and hyper thermia, hearing loss from listening to Mother’s and other loved ones telling them to get a real job, acute disorientation, many terrible nearly untreatable diseases from those who traveled outside the country to their home of origin, and sea sickness. Our med staff is ready, in fact some of them were walking around with their rubber gloves on already.

Our animals got time off also. The wolves went up to Yellowstone to visit friends, the grizzlies that watch the far-flung perimeter of The Institute had reservations at Sandals again this year. They just can’t get enough of the Turks and Caicos, Saint Lucia and Antigua. Our resident Elk herd made the short pilgrimage to Rocky Mountain National Park to see the in-laws. Our own Bighorn Sheep herd went to visit cousins and other extended family down in the Black Mountains near Kingman Arizona. They’re a little late checking in but they were sighted on Highway 34 near Allenspark just outside of Rocky Mountain National Park where they were going to stop for a night to see friends and drop off a few Desert Bighorns who wanted to see the park first hand, or hoof as it were.

It’s always a good feeling to get The Institute back up and running. Soon we’ll be having our meetings, setting agendas and summer trips schedules, putting the interns back to work with planting and watering and hoeing. They’ll be getting that lower 160 acres planted to Rutabagas again and be busy stirring up the carp ponds. Fresh fish again, they like that. We here at The Institute hope your holidays went well and you’re back in the grind with a fresh mind and rested feet. Drop us a line when you’re not busy. Let us know how your holidays went. We’ve already heard from Aunt Pheeb. Uncle Skid got out of Rikers in time to make it home for Christmas. She didn’t even know he was in New York, he had just gone out for cigarettes, but that’s a story for another time. Have a good New Year.

Move Along – Nothing To See Here

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Lots of times you’re in the heat of the action and you look up and there is something so different from what you are presently doing that you have to stop and just stare at it. Such was the case this September afternoon on the Madison river in Yellowstone National Park.

We had been shooting Otters as they swam back and forth in the river, hunting, catching big fat trout, there are many big fat trout in the Madison river, the young otters playing, bickering amongst themselves, making up, otters can’t stay mad for very long and generally just displaying all the behavior that makes otters, otters.

There are many animals in the park and usually everyone is focused on the big exciting ones. The grizzlies, wolves, bull elk fighting and they tend to lose sight of some of the more elusive, but equaling exciting species like the otters. And when you do see them it is normally just a glimpse as they flash by, barely giving you time to lift your camera for a grab shot. Which is why when you get to spend some quality time with them it is very special indeed.

But this day was different, the otters decided to stay around and hunt the area known as the log jam, a wide place in the river that catches all the logs and trees floating downstream and once one log is caught it catches another and so on until you have a large collection of logs and other debris stretching halfway across the river. Trout love log jams, there’s shade, plenty to eat, and places to hide when they need to. Otters love log jams for exactly the same reasons.

 Unbelievably we had the opportunity to stay with this family of otters for several hours, moving with them as they traveled up and down the river. Around noon they’d eaten enough, fooled around enough and it was time for a nap. They climbed in the middle of a particularly dense group of logs and became invisible once they were asleep. It was a cloudless day and the sun had been very hot making the noon-day light very contrasty, washing out the color of the water, even washing out the color of the dark reddish-brown of the otter’s fur. This made for poor shooting so looking for a shady spot to wait out our sleeping subjects we found a large pine to sit under and wait for their reemergence.

Whenever you set up your equipment, which consists of a large camera and telephoto lens on a big tripod you become a subject of interest for those passing by, an indicator that something important must be going on. “What do you see?” is the first question, then “What’s out there? I don’t see anything?”  or ” What a ya just sitting there for?” You try and answer their questions, explaining that there were otters here just a little while ago and they’re gone now but soon you get tired of answering the questions and dealing with their irritation that they missed something cool and somehow it’s your fault, and you begin giving short answers like “Nothing.” or “Scenery.” They hate that answer, the scenery one, because you have robbed them of seeing something really cool, like a wolf crossing the river, or an osprey in the act of catching a fish, and therefore have tricked them into stopping and wasted their time when you were only looking at scenery.

Sometimes, if you are a grumpy photographer and they are particularly obnoxious you reply with something like “Oh, you should have been here a few minutes ago. A mountain lion was crossing the river with a wolf pup in her mouth and an eagle swooped down and stole it from her. There was a hell of a fight.” We always throw “the hell of a fight” in there as that makes them really mad that they missed it. However if we’re feeling in a really peckish mood we often just say “Move along people. Nothing to see here.” this in a curt voice that doesn’t leave much room for other conversation.

In the mean time, while we have been feverishly shooting the otter family in this bad light, disgusted that we have to settle for what we know are going to be marginal shots that will be hell to deal with in Photoshop, yet ecstatic that we’ve had this time with these otters, you need a moment of decompression time to process all that you’ve seen. You need to find that shady spot and take in what else is going on around you. The spot we picked to wait for the otters just happened to be near a bend in the river where some large pines blocked the sun. The shadows and dappled sunshine produced this intense area of bright emerald light on the river’s surface in the midst’s of the deep shadows. The illumination of the trees reflected in the water produced a calming almost zen-like experience. It put everything back into perspective and perversely made us wish for the otters to take a little longer nap.

It wasn’t long before a new group of those visitors wanting to you to do their work for them by finding the next cool sight came up and the questions began again. The answer this time to “What do you see?” was “Nothing much, just some scenery.” It wasn’t long before we were alone again just watching the river.

Redtail Hawk 1 Rattlesnake 0

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As they say out here in Colorado “The mail needed picking up” and since we occasionally get financial remuneration via snail mail and we haven’t had any interns able to pass the strict bonding requirements we have here at The Institute, it fell to the Director to go and get  the mail.

Our mail box is located down the five mile dirt road that gets you up and down from the mountain top The Institute is located on, to the modern one lane highway below. On the way down the ‘hill’ you run the chance of seeing wild animals being wild, such as turkeys walking around trying not to get eaten by the coyotes, elk in both male and female forms, mule deer of course, bears, just the black ones not the big grizzlies that roam further north, foxes, the red ones, the aforementioned coyotes, Eagles mostly Goldens but once in a while a bald one will fly by, and lots of birds. Everything from songbirds to grouse and now some Chukar. Hawks, falcons, pelicans flying by to get to somewhere where there is enough water, lots of migratory birds and our favorite species the Redtail hawk.

The Redtail is the hands down favorite because it does one really neat thing. It hunts, kills, and eats rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes are what takes the fun out of running barefoot through the tall grass. Rattlesnakes bite. We had a neighbor near us, who was minding her own business doing absolutely nothing provoking, get bit and besides costing what a small Korean car costs it made her foot swell up to the size of your standard microwave oven. And she said it hurt too. A lot.

Most people in this country don’t like rattlesnakes. I mean, there’s a few that like them but they are not the majority by any means. People who don’t like them, the rattlesnakes not the people who do like them, generally hit them with a shovel until they’re dead. It is said by those folks who do like rattlesnakes that one of the reasons we should take these rattlesnakes close to our bosoms, are of the opinion that they do good by eating rodents, therefore let’s have them hang around doing that. Others say “Nope. Don’t think so. Gonna kill ’em”.  We believe that if they, the rattlesnakes, want to act that way they should do it way, and I mean way far away from where good American taxpaying citizens hang around. So there is a difference of opinion there.

It’s amazing that the Redtail hawk sides with the shovel smacking people and kill every one of those rattlers they see. They also pass this trait on to the young Redtail hawks by bringing home the snake, often still wriggling, for their little ones to eat. We at The Institute believe this is laudable behavior and compliment the Redtail parents on their good sense whenever we chance to speak with them.

The image above, which was taken just across the highway from our mailbox, shows the Redtail parent in the act of taking the rattlesnake it has just that moment caught, to a tall telephone pole where it would begin the process of making it not alive. Then it flew it back to the nest for the young to eat. We cheered and gave it the universal thumbs up gesture of approval before returning to sorting out the bills from the junk mail, then throwing the entire mess in the dumpster. I know, you’re saying if you’re just going to throw it all in the dumpster why bother sorting it out. We sort because every once in a while there is a check in there and then we’d have to go back and do dumpster diving which is not very dignified for a Director of a major Institute like ours to be doing. Which of course brings us to, if you’re looking for nominations for the “Most Useful Bird of the Year” award we heartily recommend Nature’s helper the Redtail hawk. Remember vote now and vote often. These birds need our support.

Into Each Park Some Rain Must Fall

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Many years ago when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was perhaps touring Yellowstone National Park he penned one of his famous poems titled “Rainy Day”. The last two lines of the poem are “Into each park some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.” Well this was in 1842 and it is apparently still raining.

Later on the Inkspots were touring the park and covered the poem with their hit song “Into each Park Some Rain Must Fall”. This was back in the early 40’s and Ella Fitzgerald was so taken with it she joined them and together they brought out a jazz version of the song. It was raining that day too.

When we arrived at the park to conduct The Institutes semi-annual inspection it was raining and in fact it rained 15 days out of 17. The two days it didn’t rain we had some sunshine but it quickly turned to rain.

Upon questioning some of the park staff who refused to give us their names, we asked “Why is it freaking raining sooooo much?” We hated to sound like we were whining but enough with the rain already. They had several theories, the most plausible of which was that the animals after a hard winter, spent either hibernating, or standing around buttocks deep in snow, or laying in the dirt somewhere needed some sprucing up before the park officially sprang into high gear after Memorial day. We thought this theory had some merit after being downwind of the buffalo herd as it trudged up the Gibbon canyon. Three hours behind a buffalo herd will give you a new belief in the need for good animal hygiene.

But while some rain is good, great even, there might be too much of a good thing. These animals are now as clean as they are ever going to be. Sparkling, they look like they’ve had the best spa day ever. The Kardashians have never been as clean as these animals and we all know how long they spend at the spa. Weeks.

We thought that the animal washing theory was a little weak and conveyed that fact to the park representative we were speaking to but they adamantly defended this as a valid reason for the rain so, being as they are like official park officials we went along with it. After all if you can’t trust someone who works for the government, who you gonna trust?

So, comfortable with the reasons given for the seemingly endless rain we continued our inspection amongst the squeaky clean animals, enjoying the fresh fragrances of the buffalo and elk and even the grizzlies, although they had a slightly musty odor that went away later in the summer, we were told by the same knowledgeable official who had the rain theory. He said “Trust me, come back in August and smell one, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” We gave that assignment to one of our newest interns.

We have provided you with an image of a high country valley being rained on as we toured up to Mt. Washburn, one of the highest peaks in the park, where it was raining. But with sweet-smelling ground squirrels and Stellar Jays accompanying us we hardly noticed. The rain. I think that was day nine. That was a particularly rainy day.

Note : To those of you tuning in late the following posts will catch you up on preceding events. There is no extra charge for this service it is included in the cost of admission. We know you don’t want to miss a minute of our fascinating but undocumented report.

http://www.bigshotsnow.com/the-words-out/

http://www.bigshotsnow.com/announcement-13/

http://www.bigshotsnow.com/yellowstone-passes-inspection/

http://www.bigshotsnow.com/ghosts-in-the-darkness/

http://www.bigshotsnow.com/you-dont-see-that-every-day/

http://www.bigshotsnow.com/now-are-the-foxes/

Into The Darkness

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Sometimes wolves go off on their own. Perhaps they just get tired of being in the pack and want some solitude. Earlier this morning the pack had been feeding on an elk cow they brought down on the Cascade Creek drainage here in Yellowstone a few days ago, and there was the usual melee of pushing and shoving, snarling and snapping as all the of the pack members fought to get their share. The kill was fresh and everyone ate their fill. Even the youngest were stuffed. It wasn’t long until the carcass was reduced to a pile of bones and wolf bellies were bulging.

The wolves began to drift apart, singly and in pairs. The younger wolves chased each other and played, burning off the energy that is a constant state for them. The older ones moved off to find a spot to curl up and sleep. This wolf, not ready to sleep and not in the mood to play with the younger wolves, began to prowl around the area checking  for intruders. A grizzly had been in on the kill the night before and the pack was nervous as they fed. Grizzlies don’t pose much of a threat to the wolves as they can maneuver away from them and even chase the grizzly off if they’re determined enough. But they don’t want the confrontation if they can avoid it.

The valley this black wolf is looking into is prime grizzly country. It’s deep and full of brush, trees and large boulders, just the place a well fed bear would hole up. The wolf’s body language says he’s not alarmed or at least hasn’t caught any scent from the bear yet but he’s carefully watching for the slightest movement. Magpies lifting, brush moving when there’s no wind, any telltale signs that the grizzly has decided to come back and feed again. All appears to be quiet so he may lie down here to keep watch, even catch a little nap himself.

Quiet times like this are rare in the wolves life. Carefully looking into the darkness at the bottom of the ravine and feeling at ease, it’s time for a rest. Soon enough it’ll be time to hunt again.