Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
A black bear gazes longingly at pine cones just out of reach high in a tree on a rainy fall evening at Yellowstone in 2006. I felt for her, trying to fatten up as much as she could for the long Wyoming winter but not wanting to risk injury and condemning not just herself but also her two young cubs. She and the cubs all made it down safely after eating the seeds in the cones, one cub in particular eating its fill.
It’s my goal to photograph every animal of the Sonoran Desert atop a saguaro but with mule deer I think this is as close as I’m going to get.
I started the morning of the last day of my fall hiking trip in 2006 with snow in the higher elevations of Yellowstone. I didn’t stay long as I’m not used to driving in snow and spent the rest of the day in the lower elevations, finishing the trip watching an elk herd in the Madison area while a steady rain fell. It was October so the rut was winding down and the scene was rather tranquil, this bull nuzzled one of the nearby cows as the rest of the herd lingered nearby. Although it ignored me and the others who watched from near the road, the bull did glance in my direction once while calling out.
It looked like this bull had six points on one antler and seven on the other. There was a ranger there who said the elk in this drainage weren’t living as long as the others, based on analysis of wolf kills they suspected minerals in the Madison River were making their bones brittle. Fortunately I was ready for the picture up top as within a minute the bull laid down to rest. Ten minutes after taking the picture below, I had to say my goodbyes as it was time to start the long drive back to Oregon.
To show how slow I can be on the uptake, it hadn’t quite dawned on me that buckhorn cholla must be named because it grows and branches like a buck’s horns until yesterday morning, when the desert sort of rubbed my nose in it.
This morning I arrived at the trailhead at 6:30am when the automatic gate was due to open, looked to be a lovely morning as the high thin clouds turned pink and orange. Unfortunately the gate didn’t open, I gave it another 15 minutes before returning home where my wife joined me for a walk in the neighborhood. We soon met a few neighbors and their four dogs, always nice to share some love with sweet pups! Later on my wife’s allergies forced her to return home so I walked to some areas I hadn’t been yet. On the way back I heard a loud cry from nearby and looked up to see a bobcat! And another! And another! The first two weren’t too happy with the third, I took this picture of it as it turned back. What a lovely morning, met three neighbors, four neighborhood dogs, and three neighborhood cats!
Sometimes it seems everything in the desert is waiting to stab you in one way or the other but here too softness abounds, bounding on all fours.
“No, no, you’re totally hidden behind the bush.”
Taken last year, got to watch this one for half an hour, have only had fleeting glimpses this year.
One more bobcat photo, this is the first one I took of my second ever sighting. Though most of the sky was blue, there were low lying clouds in the east that were frequently changing the light. This morning it worked in my favor as clouds partially obscured the sun as I walked back to check out what initially looked like a coyote-shaped cactus. The clouds not only softened the light but made it more diffuse so that the left side of the cat’s face isn’t in such deep shadow. If I could only choose one I’d prefer the shot where it is peering over the rocks but I also like how here the bobcat’s lovely face is fully shown while it verified I wasn’t a threat before settling in for a nap.
If my former home in the the Pacific Northwest was a paradise of blue and green I could describe my current home in the Sonoran Desert as a paradise of blue and brown, but that would not quite be true. There is far more green in this desert than I was expecting, a dusty green to match the dusty landscape and not the lush blinding greens of the Columbia River Gorge, but green just the same. But it is true enough for this scene, the brown cat in the brown hills, the blue sky behind. There were three pictures I wanted to take on that summer morning, a close shot of the bobcat, this more distant environmental portrait, and an even wider shot showing the rocks down to the desert floor. The latter I didn’t take as since I’m only shooting with one camera I didn’t want to risk taking off the telephoto zoom in case the cat walked up onto the top of the rocks. Instead it settled down for a nap on the ledge in the middle of the frame, out of sight of both me and the rising sun.
Boolie 