Wildcat

A bobcat is so rare to see in Yellowstone, or practically anywhere else for that matter, that I thought this little guy deserved his own post. We were cruising alongside the Gibbon River in the snow coaches when we caught word that a bobcat was seen hunting ducks along the Madison just moments ago. I didn't know how fast our bombardiers could drive until we hammered down for the bend in the river where he was spotted. When we arrived, a fellow guide had spotting scopes trained on the underside of a big boulder next to the river. The cat creeped out from beneath the rock and onto the shoreline next to us, slinking its way upstream to occupy a dark corner near the water's edge where a couple of mallards were dabbling. As the cat got ready to leap out over the water, the ducks began quacking nervously and paddling against the current away from the suspicious figure in the shadows. With his cover blown, the bobcat moved to the sunny side of the rock and sat down for an afternoon nap.
Always something new to be seen around here. I tell my travelers that I see something new every time I go outside, whether I'm out for an hour or a week. Usually it's something small. Sometimes, it's a bobcat.

Stalking along the riverbank. Notice the ducks in the background.

Drifting off to sleep.

Hunting along the Madison River.

Breaking trail.

Photography Expedition into the Winter Wild

 "By wresting a precious particle of the world from time and space and holding it absolutely still, a great photograph can explode the totality of our world, such that we never see it quite the same again." -Robert Draper, National Geographic, 150th anniversary photography issue.

It was with this quote in mind that we set off into Yellowstone. Our goal was to enter into these parks with the attitude of the famous expeditions before us. To witness this place for the first time. To feel alone on the planet amid the gurgling and thumping geysers that exhale steam like sleeping dragons. To hold our breaths as coyotes slink by with noses to an invisible trail. To share in the rigors of life in the cold alongside frosty bison and ravenous elk. And to capture this experience in photographs that would transcend their two dimensional borders. Photographs that capture the sound of bighorn sheep clambering on the cliffs, the sulfury smell of a hot spring, and the feeling of the air freezing in your lungs with every breath.

Entering the park with photography in mind allows us to seek out the subtleties in this environment. We search for wolves and moose, but we also sit still, and take in the experience. A great photograph is taken deliberately. Many of the most powerful photographs are taken after days, weeks, or years of soaking in an experience before the lens cap is ever taken off. A wise fortune cookie once said "A problem clearly stated is a problem half-solved." This is true of photography. What, precisely, draws me to this scene? Once the answer crystalizes, turn the camera on.

Elk along the Gros Ventre River

Pines drowned and petrified by geothermal outwash

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Frosty morning in the Lamar Valley

Ice crystals

Mammoth hot springs at night

Ravens together on an extinct thermal cone

Coyote on the trail

Bison digging for grass

Bald eagle landing

We were also lucky enough to witness some amazing wolf/elk interactions. A female black wolf has an elk pinned against a cliff in the below video clip. 

Lamar Canyon black female 926F pulling on a carcass

"Winter in Yellowstone" On WWF/NHA's "Good Nature"

Hi All,
I'm also now writing for Natural Habitat Adventures and World Wildlife Fund's travel blog, "Good Nature." I'll be updating The Green Man with links to those blog posts when they become available.
Here is a link to my most recent entry on that site:
Good Nature: Winter in Yellowstone

Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park

Winter Adventures in Yellowstone

This week kicked off my big season of week-long winter Yellowstone wildlife expeditions. It was a phenomenal group of travelers, and we had some truly memorable experiences along the way. The ride into Yellowstone's interior came complete with a howling blizzard and a foot of fresh powder that our snow coaches could barely stay on top of. Once the weather cleared the next day, we had a beautiful ride past many of the park's most impressive hot springs and steaming mountains. 

The entire town of Cooke City lost power overnight, requiring us to find our way to the Bistro by flashlight, and eat breakfast by candlelight next to their big wood fire. Though it wasn't part of the plan, the episode brought the group together, and added a sense of adventure to our day in the Northern Range.

After four days of zero wolf sighting anywhere in the park, we were treated to a pair of wolves feeding on an elk carcass at daybreak. Our group and two wolf biologists were the only people watching wolves in the park. Perhaps the only people watching wild wolves in the whole country.

At one point, we spotted a coyote following a packed-down game trail, scavenging for food and hunting small rodents under the snow. Realizing his trajectory, we positioned ourselves near his eventual route, and he continued past us unperturbed.

Highlights of the week also included great bighorn sheep, moose, and elk viewing around Jackson Hole. The lower elevations of this valley and the milder, windswept environs makes this area a mecca for wildlife. These sheep manage to cling to impossibly steep cliffs, leaping gracefully between promontories.

After a long day of wildlife watching in Northern Yellowstone, euphoric from all we had seen, we stopped at Round Prairie and watched the sun set on the Absarokas Mountains before heading up the pass into Cooke City for the night.

Pilot Knobs and Teewinots

They were once called the Pilot Knobs because fur trappers from a hundred miles around oriented themselves using these shark-tooth mountains. Long before that, an unknown tribe built the 'Enclosure,' a radiating dish of monolithic slabs impossibly arranged on a spire just shy of the tallest peak, where warriors or medicine men would climb to and meditate or seek spiritual orientation.

All of us here still orient to these mountains like the trappers, and like the Indians before them. I lamented that I would eventually get used to the Tetons. Surely they would fade into the doldrums of everyday life. Not so. Every time it's like seeing these mountains for the first time. 

Some days the top of the Grand is a stone's throw away. It's the way the light catches every fleck of mica. Its because i'm feeling invincible and euphoric. Other days its seems to be in a faraway dimension. It's the way the light shrouds the highest reaches. Its because i'm feeling humble and conquered. Every experience out here happens in the attention of the Tetons. Everything is mapped and cataloged onto the mountains such that every view is an orientation and reorientation. 

This particular view is the punctuation mark of many of my seasons. Trucking up to this rounded hilltop with a picnic and a bottle of wine, looking down at wolves rolling around in the meadows below. Barking Sandhill Cranes echo off the hills over a mirror-still ranch reservoir, cutting through a thick silence dusted with singing cicadas and whistling sagebrush.

My first grizzly is out in that meadow somewhere. Mom was foraging on gopher caches, trying to provide for her two cubs as summer was running out of steam. The two cubs stood on their hind legs to inspect and harass a pair of cranes that towered over them. The next year I canoed to that island with a friend shortly before she moved away. Many people here are as ephemeral as these short seasons.

Photographers come here every hour of every day. I took this in October 2011, and this shot hasn't been possible since. In October 2012, wildfires throughout the Rockies rudely dumped smoke into the valley all Autumn, obscuring visibility of the mountains entirely. In October 2013, the aspens never turned this bright,and the rain clouds never lifted off the peaks. Outdoor photography is 90% about showing up. Again and again and again.

Here, elk and horses, bison and cattle share pastures, bridging the gap between wildlife and livestock management. One summer day, we photographed pronghorn here all morning then walked up to the fence and hand-fed grass to the horses. One winter day, we went on a beautiful cross-country ski to a secluded lake where a coyote howled and howled from shore. We were awarded with this view on the return trip.

On the shortest days of the year, its best to just accept the long nights. The full moon illuminates the frost on grandfather cottonwoods before setting behind Buck Mountain. This is near the most popular summer destination in the park in the summer. I had never photographed here for that reason. I came here alone early one morning last week. The moon was blinding, and the snowy grass sparkled.

Seen Through the Looking Glass

If you had to run into a burning building to retrieve one of your possessions, what would it be? There are very few items I own that are imbued with enough significance to be irreplaceable, like the spotting scope left to me by my late mentor, Jeanne Fossani. This little post is a tribute to Jeanne and her continuing legacy of environmental advocacy around the world.

All the following photos in this entry were taken through the eyepiece of her scope.

Resplendent Quetzal

Elegant Trogan

Jeanne was the leader of a teen naturalist trip to Costa Rica through the North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier, VT. I was interested in nature, but not to the extent that I wanted to build my career around protecting it. She encouraged me to wake up at 4AM that first morning in the rainforest to experience the dawn chorus. As I understood it, no teenager had ever seen 4AM unless they hadn’t yet gone to sleep from the night before. Begrudgingly, I got myself up and walked out of the bungalow. Birds were dripping from the trees, and the cacophony of their calls seemed deafening. She pointed her old Swarovski spotting scope on a high canopy. Little blue and yellow and red gems were flitting through the acacias like a scene out of Fern Gully. I saw a Resplendent Quetzal, South America’s most beautiful bird. I realized that the landscape is full of hidden treasures that are only really apparent if you already know what to look for and have the right tools for the job. I was hooked.

Arctic hare

754M of Lamar Canyon Pack

Phantom Springs pack

I returned to Vermont and kept up the same attitude to birdwatching. Jeanne taught me everything she knew. She was fighting cancer and needed some help, so I would come over and water her plants and fill her bird feeders. She took me birding along Lake Champlain, and we saw rare gulls and ducks through that scope.

Jeanne died in 2007 and I had her scope in my car when I first heard the news. Her friends and colleagues encouraged me to keep the scope because they thought she'd want me to have it, and I didn’t know how to get in touch with her family anyway.

Lamar Canyon Pack

Grizzly

Grizzly at the edge of the woods

Black bear cubs

So for the last 6 years I’ve used the scope the same way she did: to excite people about our world’s most amazing creatures. I treated it not as my scope, but as a tool for paying forward what Jeanne was all about. I think about all the things that scope has been trained on. Photons have actually bounced off a snowy owl, funneled through the lens, and hit people in the eye.

Bighorn sheep

Northern Hawk Owl

Polar bear mom and cub

Trumpeter Swan  and ducks

I upgraded my equipment after the polar bear season, but I wanted Jeanne’s scope to continue being used to show more people amazing things. Natural Habitat guide Brad Josephs over at www.alaskabearsandwolves.com is now responsible for Jeanne’s scope. Provided that a coastal Katmai grizzly doesn’t literally eat it, it will be in great hands in an incredible place. 

Big Griz

Mountain goats

Ruddy Duck

If you want to know more about Jeanne, go here:

http://sallyglean.org/fossani/biojff.html

Polar Bear Wonderland

My friends and I were watching “Shaun of the Dead,” a parody on the zombie apocalypse, and began asking ourselves where we would go if we actually had to escape zombies. It occurred to us that Churchill, Manitoba may be one of the best strongholds around. Why? Because the whole town is defended against polar bears. What’s a zombie or two compared to a few hundred of the largest terrestrial carnivores on earth?

Some of my video footage of bears beating the stuffing out of each other.

Churchill sits at a point geographically where the sea ice freezes first on the Hudson Bay. If a polar bear knows one thing, it’s where to find sea ice, because sea ice means seal hunting. So bears are drawn to Cape Churchill by the hundreds in advance of the freeze up, sitting with their heads on their paws staring longingly at the cold but open water beyond the shore. On the air of a swift northwest wind wafts the mysterious scents of a nearby civilization.  Bacon at the Seaport Hotel, transmission fluid leaking in the shop, fresh laundry tumbling around the dryers in the residential district, donuts frying at Gypsy’s bakery. With nothing better to do, the bears get up and follow their noses.

Napping patiently on a partially frozen pond

Two cowboy conservation officers with the Polar Bear Alert Program see an inbound bear. They extinguish their cigarettes, hop into a big pickup with a winch rig and a spotlight on top and fishtail out of the turnout towards the bear with a shotgun loaded and pointing out the open window. Cracks and Pops explode over the bear’s head with clouds of sulfury smoke, and the bear gallops for cover. The bear recognizes the truck and the firecracker shells that are booming over him. He dodges into a spruce thicket and hunkers down. The cowboys circle him on the side roads, but can’t see him anymore. Every few minutes the bear dashes to the next ridge or the next willow thicket, trying to escape his pursuers, who have loaded their rifles with tranquilizers. The bear leaps out from a copse of rocks and is shot with a shoulder full of Telazol. Dazed and disoriented, the bear collapses onto the snowy road, and the cowboys winch him into the truck bed. They flip him onto a flatbed trailer and back him into D-20, an old military hangar known as “Polar Bear Jail.” Here he stays in his concrete reinforced cell until the sea ice freezes and the officers airlift him to the bay in a cargo net.

polar bear airlift out of the jail. There is a "small" 400 lb bear wrapped in the cargo net

Polar Bear Alert has saved the lives of countless bears and people since they began in the 80s, but once in a while a bear makes it past their defensive line. Generally once a week my guests come to breakfast complaining about the locals shooting fireworks at all hours of  the night, when in fact it is the cowboy officers chasing polar bears down main street past the hotels. Unfortunately bears do slip through the cracks. A couple weeks ago we returned to a very different town than the one I had just left. Right from the tarmac, Churchill was very quiet and nobody would explain why. Just a few hours before we landed a bear had sent two locals on a life-flight to the Winnipeg hospital. It took shovels, guns, and a truck to get a bear to let go of a poor girl’s head.

Later that week I was sitting in the Seaport Lounge during Open-mic night. The singer, Eli, silenced everyone in the bar and asked for a moment of attention. He opened up his iPad to reveal one of the bear attack victims, head wrapped in bandages, on the other end of a Skype video call. The entire bar began singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” over Eli’s guitar, and the iPad passed from person to person to wave hello and wish a speedy recovery. The girl is in good shape now and is back in Churchill.

Curious, clever, and an incredibly acute sense of smell. There is a pot of soup inside that last window.

Churchill is a big community that is fully intact for only 6 weeks each year. Lisa, one of my favorite rover drivers, spends the rest of her year on movie sets in Winnipeg. No surprise she is drawn to this town. Like a film set, Churchill is a place where hundreds of people gather to work on a common project for a short amount of time. Favors are granted, and reciprocity is not expected but it is always given. The hotel staff gives Karen a set of batteries for a dead flashlight in a pinch. She brings up a few copies of the Sunday paper from Winnipeg. Ramón puts his Parks Canada work on hold to come translate for our French guests all evening. We invite Brittany out on our rovers after her 6 weeks of nonstop catering to our travelers at the Churchill Hotel. Many street-facing doors are left unlocked in case a bear is sharing your sidewalk.

When the ice freezes, the bears disappear and this strange community evaporates until the next year. Some hardy souls stay in Churchill all year round, providing next year’s stories. “Did you hear, a polar bear stole Bill’s moose? Yeah, ripped the shed door right off the hinges and dragged away a hindquarter!”

That bus has no idea there is a polar bear laying in the willows 20 ft away.

On my final flight out of Churchill, another guide and I realized that we may be among the last of the polar bear guides. Our guests may be some of the last people to see polar bears in the wild. There are no roads into Churchill, and the train into town derails all the time, yet Churchill is still the most accessible place in the world to see these bears. Populations at the fringe of their species range are often the most vulnerable because they endure more hardship to survive. The Western Hudson Bay polar bears are no exception. Bears need sea ice to hunt seals. They cannot survive on anything but seals. They hunt in the winter and spring when the bay is frozen, and they fast in the summer and fall when it is not. In the last 3 decades, the window that the bay is frozen for shrank by 3 weeks, and this trend will continue.

Bruiser bear. The scars indicate he's an older bear that's fought for his place in the breeding pool. The ear tags indicate he's probably paid a visit to the Polar Bear Jail.

Something strange happened this season with my travelers. Nobody questioned me on climate change. Nobody tried to change the subject. Nobody was playing devil’s advocate. Wheat farmers to Shell Oil employees to vegetarian teachers to journalists. People in their eighties or thirties. From Ontario, Iowa, Montana, Texas, California, Atlanta, North Carolina, or Kansas. Already polar bear mothers are not producing as many cubs as they once did. The adult population is already down and declining. By 2050 there won’t be enough ice to make a living on, and the bears will be gone. Soon there won’t be enough bears to support this community and the travel companies that come here. Anyone who comes to Churchill leaves humbled by this reality. Seeing a polar bear in the wild is now equally euphoric and melancholic. My travelers leave carrying the responsibility to explain what is happening in the Hudson Bay to those who ignorantly dismiss climate projections and CO₂ graphs in their own insulated worlds. And while we watched polar bears, the largest typhoon in recorded history was whirling across the planet.

Polar Bear mothers used to have 3 cubs. Now they can only support 1 or 2.

Someone asked me what a polar bear is worth. An Inuit community can sell one of their harvest tags to a sport hunter for around $40,000. But what is a Churchill polar bear worth alive? Considering the 4,000 or so travelers arriving each year, the exorbitant prices they pay, and figuring that about 300 bears wander through Cape Churchill each year, my rough estimate is that each bear generates about $46,000 per year. Considering that a bear can easily live to 20 years old, that’s around $1 million that each bear is worth over the course of its life. Food for thought.

Whether you are interested in seeing polar bears or scouting locations to survive the zombie apocalypse, I hope you all one day find your way up to this offbeat and peculiar town. For me, some rest and recovery in Vermont, then back to Jackson for the long Yellowstone winter.

photographing the northern lights at the edge of town

Halfway Around the Yellowstone Sun

When we last left off, I was wishing Mother Nature to provide us many bears and wolves over the summer. Indeed, we had a great season for bears. Our famous “399,” now approaching 20 years old, had a new set of triplets that awed visitors all season. Scarface was out in northern Yellowstone eating whatever his worn teeth could still chew on. Wolves are scarce and seem to be getting scarcer as hunting pressure along the borders increases and elk populations decline. Though wolves were hard to find, we had amazing experiences with all the other wildlife.

My late mentor, Jeanne, taught me that the best shows in nature happen early, early, early in the morning. Though I try to explain this to my travelers, they don’t always have the drive to wake up before dawn, and as a result they miss things like bison being born in the sunrise over the Absaroka Mountains. Twin moose calves were raised happily in a big campground in the park this year. In the dawn light the calves spent all summer wandering unnoticed between campsites in the hour of dawn light before the humans stir. I came to check on them in October, and they are still doing just fine at their regular campsite in Loop B. The National Park Service should probably approach them about paying campsite fees.

Yellowstone is a place where seasons are short. Except for winter. From week to week everything changes. One wildflower starts to bloom as another curls up and fades until next spring. It seems like by the time moose calves are steady on their feet, some of the migratory songbirds are already itching to leave. The elk have just started growing their antlers when the fall colors are upon us and bugling fills the woods. No such thing as stasis. The earth seems to hurtle around the sun so fast this time of the year.

Suddenly, pronghorn are already galloping around the summer sun-dried pastures of the park, and the bison are rolling around in the dry dirt. American Dipper chicks have begrudgingly surrendered to diving into the cold, swift mountain streams. Until now, they stood at the water’s edge and beg for food from the increasingly impatient parents. Before we even recognized that summer was in full swing, huckleberry season was over and the serviceberries were producing like never before. Grosbeaks, chipmunks, waxwings, and black bears swarm these bushes, and I can’t resist grabbing handfuls of berries as I pass on my mountain bike.

Now the leaves are turning and the photographers line up in processions at Oxbow Bend. Grizzlies return to the valley floors, patrolling the park in search of whatever can be digested. As Dan Hartman stacks cord after cord of firewood in preparation for a long Beartooth winter, pine martens dart in and out of the cracks between logs, looking for the perfect cranny in his woodpile to use for winter quarters.

Tourists empty out of the park, leaving the geysers and hot springs open to our peaceful sunset enjoyment. The grizzlies and black bears wander into the hills to find a place to hole up until March, and the residents of Jackson prepare their own dens for the big winter to come.

"Diesel Smoke and Dangerous Curves..."

...sang Norah Jones, just in front of me, on the blue and glowing stage of the Stagecoach country music festival on this hot evening in the Mojave Desert. This moment was a long time in coming. I've been eager to see her perform live since I first heard her smoky voice years ago. More importantly, it had been over a year and a half since I saw my sister, and to watch this show with Ellie was a great reunion, and the ultimate destination of a 3,150-mile road trip from Wyoming to California, via Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. So here's a recap of some of the wonderful experiences along the way.

"Where the deer and the antelope play":

The weather was mostly fine the entire trip. I left south, driving through the Pinedale corridor with the  colossal Wind River range out the driver side window. I was welcomed by some of the pronghorn that will arrive in the Tetons sometime this week. As I migrate south to escape the emotionally taxing dregs of winter, they begin their own migration back north.

The first planned stop was in Sinclair, Wyoming. Not a place where one normally expects to stop. It is a huge oil refinery in the middle of the high sage desert. I had it on good authority that the small community here boasted the best Mexican restaurant in Wyoming, so I had to stop in. Deep fried bean burrito covered in green chili sauce? Yes please. The products of this refinery may be slowly killing us all, but the products of this Mexican dive will certainly accomplish it much faster.

(borrowed from somewhere on the interwebs)

Colorado

"Miner's gold and mountain men

is the best way for us to begin

to describe the greatest state we love so well.

Where rivers flow, huge pine trees, 

and mountains as far as you can see..." - Paper Bird

First, Denver, to reconnect with a friend neck-deep in medical school. She is in the habit of working about 400 hours a week, and was having a hard time downshifting for her first two-week break in years. She has taken up fanatic knitting as her methadone, so I may have a new winter hat to look forward to.
Then it was on to Boulder, where myself and a few colleagues officially met the office royalty at our partnering company, Natural Habitat Adventures. This organization is a world-class eco-tour provider, and we operate their week-long Yellowstone expeditions. If I play my cards right, I may find myself back up in polar bear country under their flag this fall. Many cocktails were shared, much snow accumulated, and I left the next morning for warmer environs.
The drive was spectacular. This was a marked difference between this road trip and past ones. By avoiding the interstate, I found myself winding and twisting over many mountain passes and through the most beautiful country in the Rockies. Like Wolf Creek Pass, for example, coming down into southwest Colorado:

Day at the Beach

The destination tonight was Mesa Verde N.P., where a good friend was waiting for me at twilight with a fresh fire and a cold beer. Here's the thing about our National Parks: they are often ruined by their own popularity. To prevent the overuse of the natural and cultural resources, everything is paved and fenced. Recognizing this, we happily camped at Mesa Verde, but quickly went next door to the undeveloped and secluded Canyon of the Ancients. Here we could walk around all day without seeing a soul, and wander into alcoves with 1,000 year Anasazi cliff dwellings. We laid around on the hot sandstone like lizards, and while there is no beach in Colorado right now, this whole environment was once oceanfront property. So we enjoyed this petrified beach for all those who were too busy to visit about 50 million years ago.

"...Well there's nothing left to say to you.  See you later if you're passing through.  Have a good time as you're traveling on.  With wild forests and a golden sun,  you've left just enough time for us to have our fun."-Paper Bird

Onward through Arizona!

That town is rad!

This is what my friend, Maria, said of Jerome, Arizona, four years ago, when we were stranded in a lighthouse off the coast of Maine. She explained, over the cacophony of 6,000 terns and puffins squawking outside, that Jerome was the one place I had to check out if I was ever in the southwest. Somehow this out-of-the-way artists' retreat was conveniently located right along my route, so I was able to fulfill my long-standing quest to investigate this place. The entire community is  perched precariously on the side of a mountain, with a winding road cutting fierce switchbacks east past front doors, and west by the roofs of the same houses. Every home was painted in bright colors, with ivy and marigolds growing over entrances, and murals adorning every side wall. Zoning seemed experimental, as if half these homes had fallen sideways or upside-down onto the homes beneath them, and their strange residents simply adapted by rotating the front door in its frame and planting a new herb garden.
I stayed long enough to have some bitchin' fish tacos at an offbeat Mexican place and walk past some antique shops and art galleries, then drove up the pass and camped near the top, right about here:

I continued on my way, stopping in Prescott, AZ for a coffee and croissant at the first coffee shop that caught my attention. Then I pressed on to California, with a fuel light indicator that was shining, unnoticed, until I was halfway into the Prescott National Forest, about 29 miles to the next gas station. Thank goodness for downhills and Neutral.
I recall listening to a podcast through this section recounting tales of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Running out of gas in the mountains of northern Arizona seemed trite compared to spending an entire unplanned winter holed up in Mandan tepees in the blustery Dakotas while trying to free frozen boats from crushing ice jams. Chief Sheheke's best reassurance to the Corps. of Discovery was "If we eat, you shall eat. If we starve, you too must also starve."

Well, I didn't starve. Instead, I rolled into an In-n-Out burger at the border of California. This chain is probably a more appropriate port-of-entry than the mandatory agricultural products checkpoint at every highway into the state. Being the first red meat consumed in over a month, this "animal-style" cheeseburger was a lovely indulgence that I validated by considering it a symbolic gesture.

"I hear them all, I hear them all, I hear them all"- Old Crow Medicine Show

I pulled into a gated, adobe-sided rental estate in Cochella Valley and met my sister who I hadn't seen in approximately forever. She informed me that her 15 friends that were also staying at this house this weekend were all female college seniors, and the guy friends I was expecting to see were not coming. I was definitely not prepared for this, but I suppose there are worse problems to have. 

The reason for the season was the Stagecoach Festival, a 3-day country music festival featuring some of the industry's greatest: Toby Keith, Lady Antebellum, Trace Adkins, Dierks Bentley, Phil Vassar, Zac  Brown Band, etc. No, I don't particularly love country music, but the point was to hang out with Ellie for a few days, not critique the frustratingly over-accessible lyrics and simplified musical structure of this genre. But Old Crow Medicine Show threw some fabulous musicianship into the mix, and Norah Jones' country outlet, The Little Willies, followed up OCMS.

My birthday coincided with the festival, and I was promptly thrown in a swimming pool by my sister and her friends at midnight. This is a sort of birthday tradition at her college. 

OCMS

The festival location was apparently chosen because it was the hottest place you could throw a party without the Solo cups physically melting. I was eager to move to a more moderate climate, so I re-packed my car and headed north.

"This is where Mylar balloons go to die."

Before leaving the Mojave desert completely, I had the opportunity to meet up with some biologist friends in Las Vegas. The Vegas Strip was probably the least comfortable place I had ever been, but the experience was tempered by an early bedtime and the company of these particularly quiet and relaxing friends. I wasted a dollar on a slot machine, drank a beer on the street (that is legal, you know?), and saw a free, cheesy, lusty stage performance about pirates and sirens outside of the Treasure Island casino. 

We woke up at 4 am --which was fine, because the temperature of the apartment prohibited sleep anyway... I swear the heater was on-- and drove two hours away from Vegas into the middle of the desert on old BLM roads. We began the hunt for the threatened Desert Tortoise. Since they were all radio-tagged, doing so was not difficult. They don't move very fast. It was nevertheless fascinating to see a rare species going about its business in an extreme environment.

Tortoise, check.

Andrew explained that the number of silver Mylar balloons draped over the cacti seems to be directly correlated with the survey point's distance to Las Vegas. After holidays like Valentine's day and graduation, the desert is decorated with the matching balloons. Nine so far collected at this one site this year, about 100 miles from the city. The record was 22 in one day at a site a bit closer. I know that sea turtles meet a terrible death when they confuse a drifting Mylar balloon husk for a jellyfish. How ironic that even our desert tortoises can't escape these things, even if they don't eat them.

It was a great experience to walk through the wild Mojave for a morning and enjoy its diversity and peculiarity. Edward Abbey wrote in his Desert Solitaire:

"It seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom."

Then onward to Moab.

Red Desert Baptism

The wind roared outside the tent and went through fits and frenzies for an hour. I envisioned my tent stakes being ripped out and thrown across the campsite by the maelstrom, but I could not check. I buried myself under a blanket with a shirt across my face. Your eyes filled with blowing sand if you tried to peek. So I waited until morning, and unearthed myself from a quarter-inch of red desert deposited over everything in my tent. This is not the first or second time I have heard of this happening here in Moab, Utah, so perhaps it is a rite of passage. The morning was crisp and beautiful.

We shook sand from our ears and hair and headed for a coffee shop. Some travel the U.S. from diner to diner. John Steinbeck does this in "Travels with Charley" and finds the American condition dissatisfying and homogenized. I think coffee shops make for a better social barometer. Every town has a coffee shop. The care that goes into individualizing that shop is indicative of the town's commitment to their own culture. In Moab, Wake & Bake was frequented by at least a few jacked-up, sandy Jeeps and some VW vans. Healthy border collies and shepard mixes sat outside waiting for some adventure. At Wild Iris in Prescott, AZ, folks sat on couches, whittling away at early morning emails, and talking about their friends in the city marathon beginning outside. The barista was warm and friendly for 6:30 am, and woke us up more cheerfully and naturally than the caffeine.  At the chain coffee shop,the only coffee shop, in Indio, California, a yappy terrier-thing barked at me from a golf cart parked in the handicap space. They didn't have ceramic mugs there, and refills cost 75 cents.

Mountain biking, hiking, eating, relaxing. Then the final stretch back to Jacksonia.

 "Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam"

Reinvigorated and ready for an oil change or two, i'll be heading headfirst into a busy spring and summer starting this week. I'll relax mid-October if I'm lucky. Until then, may the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem bless us with many bears and wolves. 

Transitions: Part II

These are all critters seen in the last week in and around Grand Teton National Park. As you can see, the weather has been oscillating quite a bit lately. Enjoy.

Grizzly 610 and cubs

OK, this was taken in Yellowstone 3 weeks ago, but we have seen wolves and bison in the Tetons this week!

Transitions: This Week in the Tetons, Part I

Spring is attempting to break through the intermittent snows. Slowly but surely, the hillsides are melting off, exposing bare soil and sagebrush buttercups. Birds are arriving right on cue, and the winter residents (humans included) welcome back these migrants after months of absence. Red-winged blackbirds are singing in the middle of blizzards, and must wonder if they picked the wrong week to return. Swallows are flying around the open ponds and under bridges. Bears are waking up and starting to wander around in search of winter casualty carcasses. Elk and Bison are migrating off their wintering grounds to reclaim their pastures throughout the ecosystem. All of the following birds were seen in the last 24 hours around Grand Teton National Park. Stay tuned for mammals.

Trumpeter Swans have been resisting the cold all winter, but the muskrats have finally stepped out from under the ice

Ring-necked Duck (right) and an American Wigeon. Ducks of all species are paddling around  in shared ponds.

Great Horned Owls are incubating eggs right about now.

Mallards weathering a storm

Barrow's Goldeneyes

A Bald Eagle, a winter visitor or a yearlong resident, watches Pacific Creek for a meal.

Trumpeter Swan slowly becoming an igloo as American Wigeons preen.

Clark's Nutcrackers are beginning to harvest some of the 25,000+  seeds they  cached last fall.

Winter in Yellowstone: Photography

Photos from January's week-long photography expedition in Yellowstone National Park. Enjoy.

Live Freein' or Die in Deseret

With just enough time to unpack the parkas and load up the bike and climbing harness, I went south from polar bear country to Zion National Park with Josh and Katie from Mountain Time. Katie grew up in New Hampshire, so her state motto, for good reason, was a recurring motif throughout the week.

Fleeing religious persecution, the Mormons packed up their wagons in 1847 and left the Midwest. They traveled westward, looking for a place where they could live as they pleased, and on their own terms. One day, they came through a mountain pass and found themselves in an endless expanse of towering, snow-dusted mesas, lazuli skies, and vivid, glowing earth, painted with every color of the sunset. And they had this expanse all to themselves! So here they settled, and named this place “Deseret*.”

I can begin to imagine what the Mormons felt when they first saw this landscape. We drove through the night to get to Zion, so our first look at its gargantuan cliffs was upon exiting our tents at first light. The Tetons welcomed me from my tent door the first time I visited that park as well, and the experience felt very similar: Expansiveness, exploration, solitude, self-reliance, possibility, freedom. The sight of Zion Canyon was an affirmation that everything unwanted in life could be put on hold for a brief time. Everything else must be relevant to the immediate present.

I'm sure the Mormons felt the same relief when they first rolled into the desert. Live Free or Die, they probably thought as they trudged across the continent, looking for their new home. The three of us weren't escaping anything in particular, but like the Mormons, we wanted to have everything on our own terms and live as we pleased. When I was a kid I would "run away" from home a lot. This usually took me as far as the back yard, and only for a few hours, but there was a sense of adventure about it, so I kept doing it. That's what we were doing in Deseret, just enjoying the feeling of running away. Live Freein'.

Here are a couple highlights from the adventure.

Mountain biking atop Gooseberry Mesa, with Zion Canyon in the background.

Near The Big Bend in Zion National Park, taken from the base of a climb.

Enjoying a sunset along the Virgin River. Zion National Park

Virgin River in Zion National Park

*Deseret was the Utah Territory’s original name for only a short time, but the Mormon’s “Deseret” is still an unofficial name for the desert southwest.

The Great White Bear

For most of the year, Churchill, Manitoba is your standard, picturesque tundra town. Located on the western edge of Hudson Bay, Churchill was once a critical hub of the Hudson Bay Company, an English fur trading empire. Now it is a big seaport for exporting central-Canadian grains to the Atlantic. But for six weeks every year, it is the polar bear capital of the world. 

Polar bears are seal specialists. They spend all winter and spring patrolling the edges of the sea ice for the breathing holes of unwary ringed seals. During the bountiful seal season, bears will almost double their body weight. The seal season ends as the ice on the Hudson Bay breaks up around mid-July. Then the bears surf southward on ice floes, pushed by the north winds until they run aground at the southern end of the Bay. For the next four months, the bears wander around in a state of “walking hibernation,” eating practically nothing for about four months while daydreaming about seals and waiting for the sea ice to re-form. 

The bears know that solid ice means seal hunting, so they trek up the coastline to the place where they know the ice will form first. Churchill is this place. Four different major rivers flow into the Hudson Bay here. This freshwater lowers the salinity of the seawater around Churchill, allowing it to freeze much more readily than elsewhere. Come mid-November, a nice, thick layer of ice extends into the bay from Churchill, weeks before the rest of the bay begins to freeze. The bears want to be in position for the big day when the ice becomes thick enough to hunt on, so 600 to 1,000 bears arrive at Churchill weeks in advance.

There are no seals around before freeze-up, and mating season isn't until May, so the bears take advantage of the downtime by socializing. Polar bears roam over hundreds, even thousands of square miles over the course of the year, so this is a great opportunity for males to see who else is in the neighborhood. Two evenly-matched males will size each other up with a sparring match. Though they look brutal, and sometimes draw blood, these matches only serve to assess the strength of their competition come mating season. Fights during mating season are terribly vicious and very dangerous for both contenders, so friendly sparring matches right now help males avoid injury in the spring.

  

Female bears also wander around Churchill during this period. Non-pregnant females are waiting for freeze-up just like the males. Females that ARE pregnant are headed to den areas where they will hibernate under the snow until March, giving birth to cubs in the process. Think about that for a second. Pregnant bears miss out on several months of prime hunting while everyone else is out at the seal buffet. She heads into hibernation in November, without having eaten since August. When she emerges from her den, she hasn't eaten in seven months, and there are only a couple more months of prime hunting ahead before the sea ice melts again.

At first glance, this makes little evolutionary sense. Females should hibernate during the off-season, and give birth in time to take advantage of the whole hunting season. Why don't they? Here's my guess: 

Polar bears and grizzlies are very closely related. Fossil and genetic records indicate that polar bears may have diverged from grizzlies as recently as 200,000 years ago. Polar bear hibernation is timed almost exactly the same as grizzly hibernation, and grizzly hibernation makes perfect sense. Grizzlies hibernate over the dead of winter, a nice strategy to budget energy during a time of food scarcity on land. The fact that polar bears' hibernation schedule is decoupled from their maritime food calendar is evolutionary baggage from their grizzly ancestors. Males and non-pregnant females have done away with hibernation entirely, suggesting that it is not evolutionary advantageous for them. Thus, we are right in the middle of a "half-finished" adaptive trajectory. If we fast-forwarded through time, I imagine we would see pregnant females hibernating much earlier in the season, or not at all.

One cannot discuss polar bears without discussing global climate change. Most skeptics have an attitude of "I'll believe it when I see it."  Truly, any one storm, one bad winter, or one unprecedented heat wave cannot be blamed on climate change. Anecdotes are not data, and single events considered independently cannot support a scientific theory. That is why storms like Hurricane Sandy and this year's crippling droughts in the west cannot be paraded around by scientists as the silver bullet equivalent of conclusive evidence. Meanwhile, skeptics refuse to consider all the statistically rock-solid trend graphs that scientists constantly release, mostly because of a cultural distrust of science and ignorance of the scientific method. This is quite a bind: Skeptics want convincing, but refuse to be convinced with science.

(Un)fortunately, climate change has become such a reality that we no longer need graphs and figures to do the convincing. Instead, dumbfounding and obvious changes in natural processes reveal sobering truths. We can look at some ecosystems and immediately notice that something is seriously out-of-whack. Regular readers of this blog will remember the relationship between the pine bark beetle, whitebark pine trees, and Clark's Nutcrackers. That is one great example of how warming temperatures have clearly resulted in the collapse of a normally self-regulating balance.

The polar bears of Churchill are another example. The sea ice around Churchill freezes later and later each fall and thaws earlier and earlier in the spring, to the point that our company's Churchill tour calendar is 2 weeks earlier than 12 years ago. Fewer cubs are seen in Churchill because fewer females can put on enough body weight in the shortened hunting season to become pregnant. The Hudson Bay polar bears are predicted to be the first population to go extinct by 2050, due to a seal hunting season shortened by 7-9 weeks, 75% pregnancy failure due to low female weights, and dwindling sea ice. Every time the average extent of arctic sea ice is measured, it is the lowest ever recorded. In my lifetime, the polar bear season in Churchill will probably cease to exist. Out-of-whack indeed.

In the summer of 1832, nearly a thousand fur trappers and native Americans trickled into present-day Driggs, Idaho, for the famous Pierre's Hole Rendezvous. Hundreds of camps were scattered across 7 square miles of the western foot of the Tetons. The trappers traveled hundreds of miles from as far as Colorado, Utah, and Montana, carrying last year's bounty of pelts in on over three-thousand horses. Representatives from every major fur company were on-hand to exchange money and goods for the pelts. The event was what can only be described as a giant trapper party. After a few short weeks of festivities, story-swapping, and cordial camaraderie between rivals, the trappers dispersed to their respective territories across every nook and cranny of the Rockies to begin the fall hunt.

Churchill lies at the heart of one of the most significant fur trade hubs in the planet's history, and the polar bears continue to rendezvous here every year, getting ready for the coming hunting season, not unlike the trappers of not-too-long ago. May they continue to do so.

Autumn in Yellowstone

Summer is over in the Tetons and Yellowstone, and winter is quickly approaching. The following photos were taken on a single three-day wildlife tour in the parks, and capture the classic autumn behaviors of these animals. I enjoyed taking these photos, and I think you'll enjoy viewing them.

Disclaimer: Some of these photos were taken closer than the 25 yard minimum (or 100 yard for wolves and bears) that is enforced by the park service. I do my best to adhere to these distances whenever it is prudent to do so for the safety of my guests and the animal. The parks depend on our organization as a role-model for responsible wildlife watching. In all cases where we are within 25/100 yards of these animals, the wildlife approached us to feed in nearby habitat. We did not approach them. In many instances, staying put causes less disturbance to the animal than turning on a vehicle, slamming car doors, and maneuvering ourselves outside of the 25/100 yard zone. If the animals are comfortable, the guests are safe, and other onlookers are being respectful, I am happy.

The elk are in the middle of their mating season right now. Males have shed the velvet off their full-sized antlers, and now posture and display them to females, rival males, and human onlookers. Sounds of bugling males fill the woods as they compete for females and defend their harems. The biggest bulls look impressive and intimidating, but spend so much time courting, fighting, defending, and mating, they have little time left to eat food, and enter winter already starving.

Like the elk, bull moose are courting females and showing off their new antlers. Moose don't shepherd harems like elk, and instead follow around females in estrus one-at-a-time, hoping for a chance to mate while fending off all other bulls looking for a chance.

Pika are fattening up for the winter and drying out the the final layer of forbs for their massive haypiles. Once the snow sets in, they will eat from their stored larder all winter long. On the bottom of the pile one might find poisonous or noxious plants that, while not very nutritious, will keep all the way until the end of the winter. The poisonous compounds in these plants are often natural preservatives, so the pika keep these around as a last-resort food source.

The berry season is almost over, and black bears are searching the woods for any remaining hawthorns and snowberries. Here, a black bear has discovered a bush full of fresh rose hips. While not the most nutritious, they are ripe and plentiful, and a welcome food source. Bears must put on 30% of their body weight before hibernation, and have an insatiable appetite as a result.

The trees are turning brilliant yellows and oranges as the green chlorophyll pigments die within the leaves' plant cells. A tree can be torn down by the weight of heavy snow settled on leaves, so these cottonwoods and aspens opt to shed their leaves to prevent permanent damage. Meanwhile, a mother moose feeds on calcium-rich underwater vegetation to recover some of the nutrients she has lost by nursing twin calves all summer long.

Wolves are becoming more active in the prey-rich valleys and meadows of Yellowstone. Elk and bison fight viciously for mating rights, and wolves patrol their territories looking for the injured losers of these fights. We are days away from our first snowstorm, and the wolves look forward to this. Elk are slow and clumsy in the deep and crusty snow, while the giant paws of a wolf act like snowshoes to keep them up on the surface.

A good guide will always be in the right place at the right time to see whatever the park has to offer. This time, the park had a lot to offer.

On the Job: Photography

Having a wonderful time leading wildlife trips through Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Here are some photos from the last 2 weeks in the field. Enjoy!

Bull moose

Grizzly #610 checking us out

Great Gray Owl

Yearling cub of grizzly #399 (above and below)

A wolf-watching sunset.

Speed Goats

These are pronghorn antelope:

But they aren't actually antelope like the ones in Africa (Antilopinae). Pronghorn are all by themselves in their own taxonomic family of American antelope (Antilocapridae), roaming the sage flats around the Wild West, including here in Grand Teton National Park. They used to have about 12 other brother and sister species (some the size of small rabbits!), which, for whatever reason, didn’t have the evolutionary edge to survive the last two ice ages. The lone surviving species, however, is probably the park’s most spectacular example of adaptive success.

Most animals exist in constant stress with not enough food. Imagine being a ground squirrel in this ecosystem. Your preferred plant food is only available for a few short months, and everything is trying to eat you: wolves, bears, cougars, bobcats, hawks, falcons, badgers, coyotes, fox, weasels, etc. Your best bet to avoid becoming dinner is to spend a few short weeks aboveground to frantically gather and store food, then return to your relatively safe burrow for the next 8 months. If you are an elk and don’t even have the luxury of hiding underground, you now have to deal with 6 feet of snow and -40 degree nights.

Pronghorn seem to be the impressive exception to this stressful reality, so if I had to be any animal in the park, it would be a pronghorn. For starters, they almost always have more than enough food. Despite growing everywhere here, sagebrush is only eaten regularly by one mammal: pronghorn. Sagebrush leaves are full of noxious alkaloids that mildly poison most herbivores, but pronghorn have the right complement of intestinal bacteria to break down and digest this otherwise unpalatable forage. And if I were a pronghorn in a vast expanse of sage, I would almost certainly be able to see a predator coming. My eyes would be so big and set so far to the side, I could see more than 270° without even turning my head.

Now suppose a pronghorn was so focused on its sagebrush lunch that a wolf managed to wind up within 50 yards of it. The wolf starts the chase, running flat-out at 42 mph towards the surprisingly unconcerned antelope. At this point, if I were a pronghorn, I would take a few more bites of sagebrush, chew for a while, scratch an itch, stretch my legs, look at some clouds, and maybe decide what direction I should move. No need to panic, because when I do decide to distance myself from the wolf, I could do so at 60 mph, and I could keep up this speed for a very long time. Within seconds I would leave the wolf in hundreds of yards of dust, and merrily return to eating sagebrush.

Why evolve the ability to run so fast? It reminds me of the wily coyote vs. the roadrunner. Natural selection in a predator/prey relationship results almost every time in a prey species that is just barely faster than its predator. If you could run, say, 45 mph, you could easily outrun the fastest thing chasing you in the western hemisphere. Nothing requires a pronghorn to run 60 mph, so, ostensibly, there is no evolutionary advantage to do so. Well, not anymore at least.

This is (a rendering of) a North American Cheetah:

Once the fastest thing in the world, it went extinct during the last ice age.

 The pronghorn has outlasted its only historical predator, and now enjoys a life of bountiful food and virtually no threat of predation.

The pronghorn in Grand Teton National Park have one more trick up their sleeve. In the winter, the snow gets too deep for the antelope to move around in. So they migrate. They head east over the Gros Ventre mountain range, 150 miles southeast into central Wyoming, where the snow is thinner and the temperature ever-so-slightly warmer. It’s the second longest land migration in the western hemisphere (after caribou in Canada). The “Path of the Pronghorn” is known only by the 400 antelope that summer here in the park. They learned this ancestral trail from their parents, generation after generation, and walk such a reliable route every year that they leave, in some places, a trail as wide as a road.

Isn’t nature awesome?

In the Food Chain

How do you compare the Appalachians to the Rockies? In describing the Appalachians, you often hear words like bucolic, pastoral, rolling, comfortable, beautiful, peaceful. What about the Rockies? Striking, grandiose, intimidating, spectacular, sublime. At some level, one of the biggest instinctual differences between the two landscapes is what lurks within them. In Vermont, and most of the East, there is nothing wandering around the woods that will kill you. Out here, there are several options to choose from.

Mountain Lion=Cougar=Catamount=Puma=Panther 4.0" across at widest point.

Here’s a mountain lion track, just a few hours old, crossing my path on a big ridge jutting into the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The cougar biologists here say that there are only about 14 mountain lions in the Tetons and surrounding national forests. That’s well over a million acres, which is a lot of space, but a female needs over 100 square miles to roam in, and a male needs five times that space! I realize how lucky I am to have stumbled across the footprints of such a rare predator. On the other hand, one begins to wonder if it was really just coincidence. Seriously though, unless you find yourself hiking alone at night on game trails with a dim headlamp, you will probably never come within spitting distance of this track’s owner. If you ARE doing all those things, you may be within spitting distance and never know it. Creepy. And awesome.

not the clearest track, but claws and heel visible

a bit clearer track, but not a full imprint of the heel and claws

Here’s a grizzly bear track, which is something to be taken extremely seriously around here. To the right of the track is a can of bear spray, which is as essential as water and shoes on a hike around here. Bear spray is a non-water-soluble, industrial-strength pepper spray that has a range of about 25 ft. As the clerk at the local gear store told me: “if that stuff goes off in your backpack, you buy a new backpack. If it goes off in your car, you buy a new car.” Having had a minor accident with this stuff last year, I am totally confident in its abilities to ward off anything living (or dead). Statistics show it is far more effective than guns in preventing bear attacks. Bears only really attack people when they are threatened or surprised, so I spent most of my morning singing, shouting, and clapping while hiking through the thick brush, and hopefully to an empty house.

Yes, nothing quite like being in the midst of the food chain to keep you feeling alive and alert.

To participate in the local food chain, you have to either eat or be eaten, and fortunately (for us) there are still many more ways to do the former. The cutthroat trout below shows that my fly fishing success rate is already improved over last year. However, this is one of the only places in the country where cutthroat aren’t being perilously outcompeted by all their invasive brethren (rainbow, lake, brown, brook, and golden trout). I am still trying to decide on the ethics of eating this threatened species (which is perfectly legal), so this fishy went back into the river.

Most people today exist entirely outside of a food chain (a factory-farmed cow crossing your dinner plate doesn't count). Don't get me wrong, we should all continue avoiding bears and crocodiles on a daily basis. But you don't have to be under threat of predation to feel alive and connected (though it works like a charm). Grow a garden, catch a fish, hunt, help a friend carry his deer out of the woods. Engage your food from the middle.

Make Way for Buffalo

The bigger male bison weigh 2,000 lbs. My car is 3,000 pounds, and about the same dimensions. Perhaps they are aware of this fact, since they have no qualms about occupying the road. And sometimes it seems like the biggest bison don’t even cross the road. They mosey into both lanes of traffic and just stand there for minutes. Here, “bison jam” is an acceptable reason to be late to work. So while I waiting for 100 bison to get out of the way, I thought I’d take a couple photos and ponder this unusual animal.

Bison are about as winter-specialized as those groomer rigs at ski resorts. They appear awfully front-heavy, and you wonder if their back legs will come off the ground every time they put their head down. They have evolved to be nature’s snowplows.  All this forward power helps them muscle through the snow, and their huge heads can easily sweep aside 3 ft of snow to expose the grass and sedge beneath. And under all that snow, the dead and dormant grasses have about the same nutritional value as paper. Bison are equipped for this problem too: they have a ruminant digestive system, meaning they have 4 stomach chambers to extract every last bit of nutrition from each mouthful (this is an adaptation shared by all bovine animals).

In these photos, you’ll notice that the bison look pretty fluffy. In fact, their winter coats are so insulative, they start overheating at -5°C. Their winter layers hold in so much heat, the snow doesn’t even melt off their backs. Hence, many iconic Yellowstone winter photos feature bison looking like giant snowballs. With the last couple weeks of 60-degree weather, maybe this guy is just fussing about how hot it is. When they get uncomfortable enough, they’ll start rubbing up against trees, stumps, fenceposts, signs, or unattended cars, trying to shed all that fluff. By May or June, winter fur is stuck to anything sharp and pointy near the plains.

Bison are not to be bothered. They can run 35 mph, and tend to have sour tempers, especially in the July-September rut. In fact, most predators won't even mess with them. There is only one wolf pack in the whole 6-million-acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with the nerve to take on a bison. And the wolves accepted into that pack are actually bigger than any of the other wolves around. Now that's pretty badass.

Bison kill more people around here than all other animals, including bears. Way, way more than bears. For some reason, tourists have a bad habit of trying to go and pet them. Bison don't like to be pet. Please enjoy responsibly.

However, I can understand why they might be a bit disgruntled with us. Back in the day, there were so many bison across the West that Lewis and Clark described them as "the moving multitude that darkened the plains." Thirty to 60 million, to be precise. As we expanded westward, we systematically and recreationally killed just about every single bison left in the world. Native Americans relied on them for food, so we killed them to starve out the tribes. When we built railroads, gentlemen would put on their Sunday best and, for 'sport,' gun down the herds from the caboose.

The only surviving bison, about 1,000 of them, were those of Greater Yellowstone, and that's where about 2,500, the vast majority of wild buffalo, still roam today.

Notice the half-shed winter fur. Yes, I know this is a recycled photo from last year.

Cascades

In Ecology we talk about a sterile yet captivating concept called the Trophic Cascade. It is really just an imposing term that describes fancy food webs. Energy enters our atmosphere as sunlight and gets converted into many different forms by the time it winds up as a handful of wet dirt. In a textbook, this ultimately gets boiled down into calories of energy being fractionally converted from one stage of life to the next (using words like primary autotrophs, first-order heterotrophs, second-order heterotrophs, etc.). At best, you are already bored reading this paragraph. At worst, you were affronted by the scientific jargon and dismissed the whole thing as abstract and heady. 

The reality is that things happen in our world that cannot be fully absorbed by the naked eye, and scientists happen to be in the business of figuring out these things. Trouble is, scientists generally describe findings in exacting, sterile, and valueless terminology. This jargon is necessary to properly document their studies, but it generally hides what that scientist wants to come right out and say: “WOW, check this out! This is AMAZING! Can you believe this?!”

I want to share with you a jargon-free story about the Trophic Cascade that shows just how awesome and complex our planet is. It’s a story about a bird and a tree, and how their relationship affects everything else living around them. 

It’s also happens to be a story about the bird and the tree that I am currently employed to study.

This is a Whitebark Pine:

This is a Clark’s Nutcracker. It’s related to ravens, crows, and jays. And like ravens, crows and jays, it’s pretty smart:

Photo courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service

And this is the ecosystem in which they both exist:

As it so happens, this is the ecosystem in which I also currently exist on work days.

The Clark’s Nutcracker is virtually unstudied in the wild. Almost everything we know about it is either based on lab studies or general observations from a couple guys in the 1950s. But here’s what we do know: They spend their autumn caching whitebark pine seeds in holes in the ground. Every year, each bird makes over 7,000 caches, and stores anywhere from 30,000 to 98,000 seeds over an area at least the size of Manhattan! At the end of the winter when food becomes scarce, it remembers, revisits, and digs up about 70% of these caches! And it’s not just guessing where it put its seeds 6 months ago: It can find them under several feet of snow, and on hillsides that have no outstanding features to cache next to. Nutcrackers have been seen digging diagonally through several feet of snow to hit their cache dead-on... and I can barely remember where I put my chapstick 5 minutes ago.

But 30% of the seeds it never digs up. It probably forgets about them, which is understandable when you’re trying to keep track of 60,000 other seeds across the landscape. This act of forgetting or neglecting turns the Nutcracker into a little, feathery gardener-- It is the only animal tasked through evolution to plant whitebark pine. Without nutcrackers, very few whitebark seeds wind up underground and ready for germination.

And here’s something pretty cool: Sometimes Nutcrackers don’t “plant” those whitebark seeds in the best places for germination. Enter squirrels, mice, and all sorts of other rodents: Though not very adept at harvesting whitebark seeds right from the cones, rodents will often raid Nutcracker caches and re-cache them elsewhere for themselves. These critters have comparatively terrible memories, so they forget where they put a lot of them. AND, for some reason, the places they prefer to re-cache the seeds are often much better for germination!

But for every hero there is a villain. This is the mountain pine beetle:

Photo courtesy of OregonLive.com

It bores holes into trees, lays eggs, and its larvae eat the tree from the inside out. The beetle also carries a little blue fungus that blocks up the tree’s tubing, preventing water from flowing up the trunk, and killing it from dehydration.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. This beetle is NATIVE to the Rockies, and as of 2009, has made over half of the whitebark stands around Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem look like this:

And with few exceptions, any tree not already dead is infected. In some places in Montana and Colorado, over 90% of the whitebarks are dead. While you process that sad statistic, also keep in mind that these trees grow very slowly due to the short growing season and harsh climate where they live. The living whitebark in the first picture above (which is, by the way, infected), is probably about 500 years old. To make matters worse, another separate, introduced disease called blister rust plays cleanup batter, sickening or killing anything that has managed to evade the pine beetle devastation.

But let’s stick with the beetle, because, like mosquitoes and poison ivy, it has evolved as a native yet pesky member of our community. The beetle has not always caused so much damage. In fact, up until the mid-90s, it only infected a small percentage of the sickly trees in the landscape. But our climate is changing, and North America has been experiencing some undeniably and unusually mild winters. Historically, Mother Nature’s winter cold snaps killed off all sorts of overwintering insects. Our beetles can withstand some pretty cold nights, but it only takes one night of extreme cold (like -25°F to -40°F) to kill off almost all the beetle larvae hunkering down inside the whitebarks. You can imagine what happens after winters when the coldest snaps weren’t quite cold enough. This winter was, at some points, kind of chilly. I’m sure the beetles loved it.

We now have 5 characters: Nutcracker, Whitebark, Pine Beetle, and the supporting roles of Blue Fungus and Blister Rust. Let’s add some more.

Whitebark are excellent at germinating in bare soils in full sunlight, much like you would find after a fire passes through, after an avalanche wipes out a swath of forest, or after a bunch of clear-cut logging. Other trees in the Rockies—most of them, in fact—can’t germinate in such exposed conditions, and rely on “nurse trees”  — a.k.a. young whitebarks —  to provide a shady and climate-controlled patch of earth to get started. Englemann spruce, douglasfir, subalpine fir, limber pine, and a whole bunch of other forbs and shrubs may eventually outcompete the whitebark for that little patch of earth, but without the whitebark to get those plants started, our forests wouldn’t be nearly as diverse.

Each blueberry-sized seed contains about 1.2 calories of nutrition. The next closest conifer seeds contain, in order, 0.4, 0.2, 0.05, and 0.02 calories. As you can see, the whitebark seed is by far the best food around for lots of animals. Grizzly bears, in years of high whitebark cone crops, will spend most of their fall in the whitebark forests gobbling up these extremely calorie-dense seeds before hibernation. Nutcrackers don’t even breed in years of low whitebark cone crops, because there simply isn’t enough other food around to for their chicks to survive!

To string this circle back together: Whitebark dieoff means fewer whitebark seeds for Nutcrackers to eat, which means that many of these birds may leave for greener pastures or look elsewhere for things to eat. Without Nutcrackers, the Whitebarks have lost their main steward, so fewer seeds will be planted and germinate.

This even affects the nearby trout! With all the old trees dead and needle-free, and no young whitebarks germinating, the shade-free snow in these forests melts a lot faster, dirtying the streams long before the normal spring runoff season, and making it much harder for the already-near-endangered cutthroat trout to feed and spawn.

Why can’t the beetles and whitebarks just mind their own business, and not drag the rest of the ecosystem into their brawl? But no, thanks to some unseasonably warm winters and hungry larvae, suddenly a lot of creatures have to start thinking about other ways to get by: nutcrackers, squirrels, rodents, bears, trout, spruces, firs, and a whole lot more. Things that depend on or are eaten by these animals are also affected, and so on. The altered interaction between a bird and its tree, a tree and its beetle, has cascading impacts on everything else around.