Mammals – Page 19

Pika in the snow

In December this pika picture got linked to from a popular site and the resulting traffic spike pushed me over my monthly allowance, so I shut down the personal site I had run for almost two decades and started looking at other options. In the end I decided to give Flickr and WordPress a try for a year and then will decide if I’ll go back to self-hosting or not.

I’ve re-edited the picture and I think it looks better than it did on my old site, and even better you can download it at a much larger size. It’s also much easier for me to upload images both here and at my blog, so there are some definite advantages to my new setup.

I met this pika in the fall of 2007 on the trail to Amphitheater and Surprise Lakes in Grand Teton National Park, a trail I’ve hiked on multiple occasions. My pictures of this pika are my last pictures from the trip. The white in the background is snow, I had to turn around higher up on the trail as the snow was getting too deep for my hiking shoes. Originally I was going to spend the next day in the park but ended up cutting the trip short as the area got hit with a heavy snowstorm.

Life, like the weather, can bring unexpected changes, hopefully this one will be for the best.

Treed

While driving past Bower Slough I came upon a family of river otters that were fishing and preening and playing. After a while a family of raccoons came meandering down the shoreline but they bolted for the trees when the otters saw them. After the otters circled the trees for a while they moved on and eventually the raccoons descended back to the ground. This one initially got caught behind some wire mesh that had been put around the base of the tree to protect it from beavers, but it climbed back up past the mesh and hopped into an adjacent tree and then to the ground.

Closely Monitored

This doe is part of the first wave of Columbian white-tailed deer that were brought to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in 2013 with the goal of establishing a permanent herd at the refuge. A second wave is planned for 2014 and a third in 2015 if needed. That’s her fawn behind her, the first generation of Columbian whitetails born at the refuge. I wasn’t going to put this image up as the dark blobs from the out-of-focus teasel are a bit distracting, but I like how clearly it shows her radio collar and ear tags and how closely monitored her movements are.

Big Horns, Little Tails

I met a group of bighorn sheep ewes and lambs while hiking up to Mount Washburn on the last day of my trip to Yellowstone in 2011. They were on the trail itself and while it is a wide trail it was still a bit unnerving to have to walk so close. They were very relaxed, however, so I put the telephoto end of my zoom to good use and played around with some close-ups, including this shot of a ewe’s tail.

(Almost) Out of Reach

My last day in Yellowstone had been wonderful, but I was hiking down from Mount Washburn on my last hike of the day and would soon leave for home. I stopped in my tracks when I heard a sharp noise to my left and was rather surprised to see a black bear eating seeds from pine cones in the tree beside the trail. The tree was on a steep hillside so even though the bear was at the top of the tree, we were almost at eye level. I made enough noise to be sure it knew I was there, but it didn’t pay me much heed as it tried to eat as many seeds as it could without moving from its perch in the tree. It would snap branches to bring pine cones closer if need be, or just stretch way over as it did here, all surprisingly at ease for a creature so large on branches so thin.

Love

After falling in love in Yellowstone with the colors and patterns of Mammoth Hot Springs, later the moss of the rain forests of the Olympics, then the bark of the ancient redwoods of California, I finally merged my love of small details in a larger landscape with another and greater love, the wildlife I had been shooting for years.

I dreamt of taking this picture for many months before my trip to the Tetons and Yellowstone, thinking I might get a shot at it in Yellowstone, but instead I found a bison herd near the road on my last morning in the Tetons and was able to photograph from the safety of the car. Afterwards I was so nervous I could barely bring myself to review the pictures on the camera to see if I had gotten the picture I so hoped for. When I came to this picture of one of the bulls, I stopped worrying and left for Yellowstone full of joy.

📷: Canon 7D | Canon 500mm f/4 + 1.4X
🗓️: September 28, 2011

A Christmas Coyote

Thanks to the auto tour at Ridgefield NWR, I’ve had the chance to watch coyotes up close on many occasions without disturbing them, such as this one hunting for voles on Christmas afternoon in 2011. But if it survived into the spring of this year it’s likely dead now, as the coyotes on the refuge were killed in an attempt to improve the likelihood of Columbian white-tailed fawns surviving into adulthood. The deer are a threatened species while coyotes most certainly are not.

Killing coyotes may be necessary to help the whitetails recover, but I’ll miss them, they were one of my favorites.

Watched & Watching

I headed up to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge yesterday for the first time in nearly a year, wondering what changes I might see, but the most unexpected change was one I saw in my rear view mirror. I had stopped along Rest Lake to photograph a couple of bitterns that were hunting near the road, but I kept having to move up to let traffic behind me through, before backing up to resume my watch.

The bitterns were soon gone but a great blue heron was slowly working its way in my direction, so I settled in to see how close it would come. I frequently checked my rear view mirror to watch for approaching cars but none came. But then in the mirror there was a slow movement of brown from one side of the road to the other, and when I swiveled my head around to look got my first glimpse of a Columbian white-tailed deer. Two of them actually, a doe and her fawn.

The doe had bright yellow tags in each ear and a large radio collar around each neck, she was one of thirty-seven that were emergency translocated earlier this year from another refuge in Washington (and one of twenty-nine that survived). Her fawn, though, belongs to the first generation born at Ridgefield. It and the other deer will be closely watched to see how they survive in their new home, as the Columbian whitetail was only recently downlisted from endangered to threatened status.

But at the moment, it was just the two of us watching each other, each seemingly as surprised as the other by the encounter.

Peace

My favorite coyote picture, taken over a year ago in January of 2012.

Coyotes have a complicated and controversial relationship with our modern world, and I’m not sure how this pack will fare now that subdivisions have replaced the meadows on the hills above the refuge. I see them near the road sometimes as I drive into town before sunrise, but I see them as roadkill too. And there will be conflicts with barbed-wire fences and dogs and cats.

But on this morning, as it hunted for voles with its mate, and as a few snowflakes began to fall, all was peaceful. Only the three of us were around, and since I stayed quiet in my car, they let me watch at my leisure as they worked the length of the dike.

A peaceful morning for me, if not for the voles.

Clues Two

I saw my first muskrat at the Virginia Tech Duck Pond back when I was first getting into photography. Sadly I found it dead not much later, but my fascination with these rodents was born. So I was particularly pleased when we moved to the Northwest to find them here as well. Over the years I’ve seen one in most of the ponds and lakes around the auto tour at Ridgefield, although surprisingly I seem to be the only one who is excited to see these adorable creatures.

While the face of the muskrat is unique compared to the other aquatic rodents at the refuge, its distinctive white claws are also an important clue, visible here on the front paws of this hungry muskrat. While I have seen muskrats many times, they are shy creatures and my glimpses are usually brief. Thankfully though this one let me photograph from close range to my heart’s content as it dined on plants at the edge of Canvasback Lake.

This is why I can’t stop going to Ridgefield.