Both yesterday and today we were up and on the road in the pre-dawn cold to get to good lookout spots for gray wolves reuniting after the evening hunt. The local pack is one of the largest in Yellowstone, with 34 members (packs typically have only 9 to 12 individuals) including three mothers (this is very unusual, most packs only have one litter from the alpha male and alpha female) and 18 pups from this season, all of whom have survived. We learned these pack details from one of the premier wolf watchers in the Lamar Valley, who was generous enough to educate us as we watched. We saw 27 of the pack members on Wednesday, with lots of pup play and happy reunion behaviors — wolves are very social and will collectively greet members when they return to the pack. Today the pack was more dispersed and less engaged with one another, which might reflect how well the night’s hunting had gone.
Yesterday while we watched the wolves across the valley, we also saw bison, ravens and a grizzly bear who all wandered through the same area with the wolves. The pups chased the ravens off; it reminded us of children chasing pigeons. The bison and the grizzly mostly ignored the wolves. Today it was bison, pronghorns and ravens — the pronghorns moved through the wolf area very quickly!
Wolf watching took much of each morning. Wednesday afternoon we spent a wonderful session with Dan Hartman, who has been observing and photographing owls, picas, eagles, squirrels, bears and mountain goats in the Beartooth Mountains for many years. He has a tragic video of a little squirrel industriously caching pine cones for the winter, only to have both grizzly and black bears come and dig them up. And indeed, today, we saw a squirrel engaged in just such behavior, hopefully no bears will raid his cache. Thanks to Dan’s mountain goat pictures we could imagine what the small fluffy white dots we saw high on a steep mountain ridge really looked like. We also witnessed, and participated in, bison traffic jams. When a herd of bison decides to cross the road, you just wait. It was fun watching a calf start to cross the road, but then stop. It seemed too frightened to cross. Mom soon came to the rescue, escorting the calf across the road.
Today after our wolf viewing we started the drive back to Jackson for the final part of our trip. We made periodic stops to stretch our legs, see additional hot springs, and have a picnic lunch by the Yellowstone River. One way to find interesting things to see is to watch where other vehicles have pulled off the road... and today this brought us a great viewing of a black bear. Another gave us a quick viewing of a short tailed weasel as it weaved its way through the sagebrush...no, the car owners were not stopped to view the weasel, they were looking for a wolf.
Tomorrow is the travel day home, but because our flight is late afternoon, we will be able to have a local expert take us birding tomorrow morning— a fine finale to the trip!
