This is the last of my images from Yellowstone that I will share right now. It’s sorta a nod to the little sweeties that don’t get all the press. This guy was just along the road that was blocked by a herd of buffalo. How many people took his photo compared to the buffalo? He needs to get a better agent.
Speaking of going back and revisiting my trip to Yellowstone (May 2007) here are a couple of foxes we saw. They were a little bit shy, but not too much. It was fun seeing them … and they look like they have just been through a long winter, don’t they?
These are all photos of the Brinnon Elk Herd … AKA the Dosewallips Elk Herd. In the winter the elk come down to the lowlands, including along the beach areas near Brinnon, WA … a small (very small) community along Hood Canal on Highway 101. They are used to people, mostly. The exception are the bull elk … they tend to stay away from people and are harder to spot. In a couple of the images, you can see some yearly male elk. They will leave after the first year. (and no, they don’t actually use the soccer nets for playing elk ball)
And I bet some of you were expecting a photo that had a chipmunk and a rabbit in the same image. Sorry about that. I’ve never seen a rabbit climb a tree, either. Anyway, I’m just working my way through images and doing some editing and clean-up … plus adding some of Lightroom’s adjustments since I took some of these several years ago. I would recommend doing that every so often. Adobe really does make significant changes to their editing tools now and then … it makes it worthwhile to pay the subscription fee to get all the updates (unlike some company’s that charge the subscription fee and in return you get no new features).
I think this is the native snowshoe hare, but I’m not sure it hasn’t been hybridized with some domestic variety. But it’s a cute little bunny anyway, yes?
On a dayhike up to Martins Park above Low Divide (between the Elwha and North Fork Quinault river valleys in the Olympic National Park), we saw this black bear browsing the fresh greens. We were a little nervous … the above photo was taken with a normal lens … not a telephoto. But we had seen black bears a number of times before and hadn’t found them aggressive. Regardless, we didn’t stay around to do any bear watching. Our nervousness increased quite dramatically when the bear followed us for a mile or so down to near where our campsite was at Low Divide. We took special care to bear proof our food that night.