Teton Science Schools

Spring into Summer: Celebrating Month 2 of the YPP!

Bears are spread across the high country. Moose have taken up residency near shady water. Baby birds are fledging left and right. The bright yellows and greens of spring wildflowers have been replaced by the purples and blues of lupines and geraniums. Pronghorn are staking out territories, and bull bison are beginning to spar for access to females. Its eighty degrees in the afternoon, and clouds of pollen are wafting off the grasses that are already losing their rich green color. Everyone is sneezing, and everyone else is gawking at the roadside elk.

Two months into the Yellowstone Phenology Project, and I have been amazed by how dynamic this world is. Every day something wraps up until the next year. Every day something happens for the first time in 12 months. If last month was the month of awakening, this is the month of color. Here's a recap of where we've been and what we've seen in the last 30 days, and here is a recap of the first month!
Thank you all for following this project. It's been a blast, and I'll keep it going as long as I can!






 














 



 




 





Spring: A Month of Photographs!

Phenology: the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life.

Today marks the one month celebration of the Yellowstone Phenology Project! According to analytics, The Green Man has seen much more traffic this month than ever before, and I want to thank all of you for making that happen. Please continue to share these links on FB and other social media, and please subscribe to this blog using the email box on the sidebar!

To celebrate the success of this project, here are some video highlights from this month. Enjoy!











It has been a fun challenge to produce diverse and interesting photographs that represent the fast-paced seasonal change here in the Northern Rockies. Today I wanted to recap the amazing month that we've had here. Snow has melted off in the valleys and mid-elevations. fledglings, pups, calves, and fawns are being welcomed into the world by healthy, happy parents. The landscape has changed from a dull brown to a thousand neon greens. People are seeing their neighbors again. Everything smells like charcoal grills and sweet cottonwoods. Everything is coated in pollen, and our most colorful spring migrants have arrived. These are the weeks that everyone here lives for.

Change happens quickly yet can be hard to notice on a day-to-day basis, so lets see how things have progressed from May 9 to June 9. Thanks again everyone, and keep watching!
































The Yellowstone Phenology Project: 5-9 Grizzly Fishing


Phenology: the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, 
especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life.


I'm going to try something here. I want to post a photo or video every day through the spring, summer, and fall. Frank C. Craighead Jr's book "A Naturalist Guide to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks" is an amazing resource that walks us chronologically through the seasons, pointing out what animals are present in the valley, what they are eating, what plants are flowering, and how all of the cogs in the ecosystem clock are turning each week. I thought it would be fun to capture, photographically, this annual march through time. Change is the only constant around here. Like Ferris Bueller famously said, "life moves pretty fast. If you don't look up once in a while, you might miss it." Six months from now, I hope to be able to use this little project like a flipbook to watch the seasons unfold and meld chronologically. Here we go,we'll start with a bang.

This young male grizzly has recently emerged from his first solo hibernation without mom (the famous Grizzly 610). He walks the shore, looking for dead cutthroat trout and mountain whitefish that have been frozen, preserved, in ice all winter long.






























    and a bonus video to kick things off!



Flying over Yellowstone

Grand Prismatic Spring


"Kodiak to control, are you in the tower?"
"Negative, I'm at home in my recliner."
"Are we clear for takeoff?"
"One minute, Kodiak, let me look out the window...Yep, air is clear for takeoff."
"Kodiak to control, we are ready for takeoff...as soon as we can taxi a herd of elk off your runway."

With this exchange, we rolled down the Gardiner, Montana airstrip and lifted into the skies above Yellowstone.

Flight path for our maiden voyage


























After lots of finagling over insurance policies, consultations with pilots, and doubts about the reliability of weather conditions in March in the Northern Rockies, we pulled the trigger and included a couple of scenic flyovers into our March Natural Habitat Adventures/World Wildlife Fund programs.

Full disclosure: Many a time I've sat on the benches watching Old Faithful erupt while being thoroughly annoyed by the little private single-props buzzing and circling high above the geyser. People come to the park to experience wildness and wilderness and solitude. Old Faithful is not the place to find peace and quiet in the summer, but a swarm of small aircraft overhead is my nail in the coffin. I hate those things.

Typically, scenic flights are not allowed over the parks, precisely because of the visual and aural upset they cause to those on the ground. A couple years ago, someone figured out that there is a legal loophole allowing private flights to operate as long as photography is the goal. If someone on board has a camera, the whole flight can be green-lit as a photography mission. I imagine this is a loophole that will be closed in coming years.

Fortunately for us, we were actually on a 8-day photography expedition in northern Yellowstone, so there was no denying that our goal was to take pretty pictures. And fortunately for my conscience, the interior of the park is closed to all visitors in mid-March, so our plane would not disturb a single person once we left the northern range.

The flight was spectacular. We traveled from Gardiner all the way to Jackson Hole, admiring the Tetons, the Gros Ventre Valley, the remote Thorofare region of Yellowstone, the Pelican Valley, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Old Faithful, Grand Prismatic Spring, and more. We saw bison eking out a cold, snowy life along the shores of Yellowstone Lake. We saw wolf-killed carcasses behind knolls that had blocked our view from the roads all week. It was an opportunity to really appreciate the size and scale of the wild lands out here. I hope you enjoy these photographs of the highlights.

Taking off in Gardiner, MT
























We came across many remote geyser basins in areas inaccessible without a multi-day backpacking trip

Grand Teton
U-shaped valleys, cirques, glacial lakes, and a terminal moraine! TSS' Field Ed team would probably love this image :-)
The Red Hills in the Gros Ventre river valley


Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Lower Falls of the Yellowstone



Yellowstone River meandering through the Hayden Valley

Burn mosaic from the 1988 forest fires. Light green are areas that burned.


Grand Prismatic and Excelsior Geyser


The guinea pigs pioneers of our first flyover program! Thanks guys!

The Most Amazing Bird You've Probably Never Heard Of

[This is part three of a series of posts featuring photos from our March programs in Yellowstone with Natural Habitat Adventures and Wildlife Expeditions of Teton Science Schools].

American Dipper courtship posture.






































When I first came to the Yellowstone Ecosystem, there were a couple species I really wanted to see. At the top of the list was this peculiar little bird, the American Dipper. They live along rivers and creeks in the Rocky Mountains from Canada down into Mexico, and forage on a prey that nothing else has figured out quite how to access. It's the entrepreneur of the animal kingdom. For every potential food source, there is something that will eventually figure out how to eat it. Insects breed, lay eggs, hatch, grow, metamorphose, and thrive all over the rocks in turbulent mountain streams. But except for the dippers, nothing has quite figured out how to eat them. Sure, trout wait downstream for bugs that get peeled off their feet by the swift current, but dippers go right to the rocks and pick off insects directly.



Hunting for insects in the creek.


























In a great example of a burgeoning evolutionary trajectory, the Dipper has very few adaptations for its lifestyle. He is a songbird, just like a thrush, a tanager, a waxwing, or a robin. He has no webbed feet or dagger-like bill. What he does have is oxygen-rich blood and a slow metabolism for life in cold water, not to mention some waterproof preening-oil. His biggest asset is its charisma. He dives into the water, paddling the rapids with his wings, sometimes popping up fifty yards downstream, on the other side of a class II or III rapid!

Swimming.


























When he does emerge, he usually does so with a bill full of stoneflies and caddisflies. In the nesting season, he might take these insects and fly right through a waterfall to get to his nest on a dry ledge behind the cascade. If there are other dippers around, he will storm out from behind that waterfall and karate-kick the intruder right into the water.


Territorial dispute.


























He perches on rocks along the shore, bobbing (dipping) up and down, trying to look like the moving water behind him.  "Bird and stream, inseparable," as John Muir said. A female lands nearby, his dipping speeds up, and he starts to sing. His rambling warble sings on and on without pause, almost mimicking the musical sound of the proverbial babbling brook. She starts dipping up and down too and pacing around on her rock. Both birds take off and chase each other over the stream, up into the trees, into the sky, and back over the water, splashing down together right in the middle of an eddying pool.


Courtship flight.



























Watching these dippers along the Gardiner River over the last two weeks was mesmerizing. One of those little jewels in nature you would only find if you already knew where to look.


Gardiner River, and the Boiling River hot spring steaming towards the background.