Yellowstone Pictures: Elk Edition

[agilebrit]

We saw amazing numbers of elk and bison there, though no deer, which I found odd. This post will feature the elk!



This was the first elk we saw, a little spike buck grazing from the river:




Then the wind shifted, and he looked right at me:


The next elk we saw were a group of cows and calves accompanied by a bull with a truly amazing rack. We walked out a ways to see them.




She crossed the river and shook off:


And here's a sort of Art Shot:


This guy was outside Mammoth Hot Springs with a group of cows:


And this one was all by himself next to the lake, rubbing his antlers in the trees and bugling. I'd never actually seen or heard that in the wild before, so it was very cool:






There was a group of cows, and one calf, further down the road by the lake in the West Thumb Geyser Basin; it's possible he was after them. There were a slew of bulls in the area; we could hear them and it was so cool. A little spike buck was following a cow and calf pretty closely. The calf had gotten lost and was making these really cute noises to find his mother, and once he did, he bumped her udder pretty hard, more than once. And she kind of bounced sideways with a "WTF, why aren't you weaned yet, go graze, dammit" look.

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

What excellent pics - thank you for sharing them.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Hubby got me a new camera for my birthday and it is a shiny, shiny thing -- 42x zoom. I'll be posting photos of the random critters we saw later, as well as some of the geothermal features. Yellowstone boils. It's wild.

[bojojoti.livejournal.com]

Great photos!