Saturday, June 09, 2018

Yellowstone 3 - Head Sticks

I was going to have a title about horns, but a quick bit of education has enables me to understand the animals featured this time mostly don't. Have horns that is.

Still let's start with one that does.  In my pre-reading for the trip I saw pics of bighorn sheep, and they didn't really grab me.  I mean at the end of the day they are sheep, and just because I live in Wales I'm not welsh so there is no cultural attachment.

However when we found some bighorn rams I was quite impressed, and ended up taking more shots than I would ever have expected.  I think the excitement of having to scale a cliff face and balance precariously to get the shots added to the fun.















Well OK I exaggerated a little.

We only saw a couple of distant females - little big horns maybe?

On the last evening we went searching for pronghorn, the worlds second fastest land animal, but didn't find any.  We did see a few more bighorn sheep though in the blue light


and also a small group of mule deer.  My wariness of bumping up the ISO on my 7DII meant I messed up most of those shots though.

Now mule deer and elk (wapiti) have antlers, not horns.  I was beginning to think I wasn't going to get an elk shot of any note - a few uninspiring snaps of cows and a bull down in a river,



but again on the last evening we got the chance to snap a bull against the hills.  These are red deer on steroids, with bulls weighing up to 330kg.  They were long thought a sub-species of red deer, but in fact they are a separate species.

In Europe when we talk about elk we don't mean wapiti, we mean moose, and we had a few views of these impressive beasts as well.