Thursday, May 4,2023


I got up earlier today - 4:45 am and got to the spot where you can see the wolf dens around 5:45. Not much activity – just a bit of coming and going. I did see about 6 wolves.


We also saw a grizzly bear from that same spot. Later, I saw several more grizzlies. 2 I almost hit with the truck. I was driving along just west of the Trout Lake trailhead when a mom and a 1-yea old cub came charging out of the sagebrush onto the road. I had to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting them. They stayed on the road for a minute or so and I got a picture of them:





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  Wednesday, May 17,2023 A good day. Lots of wolf activity this morning. We briefly saw several pups, had lots of wolf interaction, heard howling, and watched a group go off on a hunt. Not much for bears, but here's a short video of a big greeting scrum before they went off hunting: I've found a phone-to-scope adapter that will let me react quicker to events like this, so next year's videos should be better.
Read more
Image
  Sunday, May 14,2023 Bears! The wolf watching was slow this morning. Nothing interesting happened, but I did learn why the pups are late coming out of the den. Rick McIntyre, the wolf expert, has behavior notes going back to just after the reintroduction. This pack dug out the den we are watching – we call it the sage den – about 10 years ago. Rick went back in his notes and discovered that each year they have used that den, the pups didn't emerge until about 2 weeks after all the others. The thought is that the exit from the den is so steeply sloped, they can't climb out of it until they are bigger. So, we probably have another week or so to wait. Meanwhile, I've been seeing bears. 7 separate bears, all grizzlies yesterday and 10 today – 7 grizzlies and 3 black bears. The black bears were interesting. I was going up to investigate the peregrine falcon nest near Calcite Springs. On the way, at Rainy Lake was a bear jam – a mom black bear and 2 yearling cubs: ...
Read more
Image
  Saturday, May 20,2023 A sad day. 2 more pups died. We saw wolf 907 bring them out of the den. Nobody knows why they died. I did see a moose close enough to photograph on my way in this morning. It's been hanging around the Floating Island Lake and Elk creek area for several days, now.
Read more