Banner Day

This was a great day in Yellowstone and it seemed like everyone was out today.  That meant that we had a lot of opportunity to do all sorts of things.  This is the amazing thing about Yellowstone and trekking out the Northern district of Yellowstone.  We never start out looking for anything, when suddenly it appears.  It's serendipitous all the way through the Northern part of Yellowstone.

So the nice thing about having been to Yellowstone many times is that we know the places and haunts for things...like the owl's nest at the ranger station, the Eagles of Madison River, the elk at Mammoth (who I refer to as the Chamber-of-Commerce elk), the osprey nest at Lamar Canyon, but there's always something special (and usually more than one) at Slough Creek.  Trekking there today led us to an old wolf's den that was used by the Slough Creek pack, and now by the Prospects.  The gossip is that the Prospects suffered a raid by the Mollies and one Prospect was injured badly, but has been seen walking around and healing.  Walt's very patient with me cause I love this wolf stuff and could sit there for hours watching the den to see activity.  The clear sigh of wolf watching is a row of scopes, because wolves will run from humans and are very rarely close to them and the park sets rules of no closer than 100 feet, and the good news is most wolf enthusiasts follow that rule, which means scopes.  Today through my binoculars, I saw the blond male at the den moving around in this old den and loved it.

We started at Floating Island Lake with a black bear that had drug out an elk from the lake, it is surmised by the rangers, from last winter, and now that the lake has thawed, the bear drug it out to land....yummy!!!! (Egads!)  But the bear seemed to like it well enough.  So much so that he was chasing other bears off the carcass!

Right in front of us, because the bear was on the other side of the lake as we didn't want to 1.) compete for that yummy piece of carcass and 2.) weren't interested in getting mauled by the bear, was a row of high grass with a lot of red-winged and yellow-winged blackbirds.  Now I'm not a fan of blackbirds, but yellow & red-winged variety are not only pretty, but they have a very interesting song.  Walt always knows I like these birds and will grab a shot just for me.

Moving down the road, we check out the golden eagle nest there and nothing yet, so turn around to find an elk prancing down the meadow....elk don't walk,, they prance.

Maybe she was prancing for Walt!!! She was looking straight at him!

And just as we were getting ready to leave....what should show up but our favorite prankster - the coyote!

Maybe it's cause man has always had a great relationship with canines and I can picture these creatures at early man's fire sharing food, or maybe cause Bruno is with us on all our trips - who knows, but these animals seem so friendly like they are really interested in us.  The coyote started to turn away and then Bruno and I started howling (yes, we howl together beautifully - for some ears!), and he looked back to see what was going on!

We then turned back toward Mammoth but before we were finished we ran across a very industrious badger who was building a den, or two, or three for her family.  Walt got a great video of this which I will post later (running out of internet good will, I think).  But Walt did do a great video of the thundering beasts of the Serengeti of North America - the Bison.  Enjoy!

 One short note on the blog.  I keep my Facebook Page mostly for sewing and the like, and this can monopolize it, so I'm posting these links onto our CWUAP.com Facebook page.  They won't appear on my regular page anymore.  If you're interested you can subscribe here via the RSS feed (almost any feed reader will pick it up - my fav is Feedly, but any feed reader will do.