Dutch Duo Wildlife Photography

March 2011, USA
21 - 26 March, Yellowstone National Park
Two days of driving north through Arizona and Utah brought us to Plain City, where we picked up our warm clothes at Claudia's cousin and left our flip-flops and shorts in their basement. We left on Sunday morning and six hours later we were in West-Yellowstone. The amount of snow here was amazing. It is hard to believe this will all melt away this summer.

This might seem a lot of wildlife, but we have visit this park so many times, that we would rather see some wolves. We cruised the park, but just could not find them at close range.
The winter scenery is gorgeous, especially after it started to snow on the second day. We took pictures of the bison covered in snow, something we always wanted to do. The next day the sun was shining and the temperature dropped to a nippy 14F.

After more days of seeing hardly anything we were getting pretty desperate and bored. Are we losing touch? Normally we are always lucky to be at the right place at the right time. Had camping life in Mexico made us too lazy, having the boa constrictors hanging in the tree above the trailer, hummingbirds flying around our head and whales jumping in the ocean seen from our camp site...
We have two more days left, where could we go? We started searching the Internet and maps, but there is more snow everywhere. We decide to give the park another try.

On Friday morning we cruised the Mammoth area again and continued to the Lamar Valley. At 10am we saw a single wolf walking 30 yards from the road! That was promising! She was not wearing a collar and looked pretty. We parked at a turnout and saw that two coyotes spotted her and took off.

Right in our view the wolf ran into a lone cow elk. The wolf tried to scare the elk, but the elk stood her ground. The wolf kept approaching her, even trying to ‘play’ with her (of course thinking about brunch), rolling around in the snow, but the smart elk did not move. They were sometimes nose to nose. It started snowing again and the 600mm was shaking in the wind. Hard for PJ to make pictures, but neat to watch the interaction between the animals. We wondered what was going through their minds.

After 50(!) minutes the wolf finally gave up and continued east. We were the first ones to pass her and drove to the next pull out. We had noticed a lone elk grazing here every day. She was doomed to become a meal. We could see the dot wolf getting bigger and coming closer to our pull out. The wolf saw the elk, ran toward her and grabbed her by the throat. They rolled down the hill and within 30 seconds the elk was dead! This was more like the African way of killing an animal; quick, almost painless and the elk probably did not realize what happened to her. I was hand holding the 600mm through the window and of course the pictures I took were not in focus, because I was exclaiming WOW too much, but what a thing to witness.

The carcass started to slide down the hill and we could not see them from the truck anymore, so we walked the road to get a better point of view. The wolf had just begun her brunch, but it started snowing again.
Suddenly we heard hooves clicking on the asphalt. Six bison were galloping along the turnout towards us. Shit, we were halfway the road, without cover of the cars! Staying put was not an option, with the bison coming closer. Getting off the road was also not possible; the snow next to the road was waist deep…so we walked away from them to a car that had stopped on the road to look at the wolf. We were now too close to the wolf, 90 yards, (that is what she thought, not us) and the wolf left the carcass and went up the hill. We took cover behind the car and waited for the bison to pass us. Then we walked back to the truck and waited for the wolf to return to the carcass. She did that after 15 minutes.

It started snowing and during one of the storms, with no visibility the wolf sneaked out on us and never came back. Three coyotes took turns on the carcass and picked it clean quick.
We left late afternoon. The ‘first’ elk was still by herself, trying to find food in the thick layer of snow.

Because yesterday was a reasonable good day (still not photography wise) we gave the park one more try. We drove all the way to the east, but nothing was happening. The carcass was clean and a pack of wolves were sleeping dots on a hill. On our way back to the entrance we suddenly saw a heap of ravens, right where the ‘first’ elk was. No elk around. Did the wolf brought her pack and killed the elk last night to have her revenge? We will never know.

We left the park at 11am and drove to West Yellowstone to spend the night at Claudia's aunt and uncle’s house. They had left for a week in Mexico, but left their front door unlocked for us! PJ first had to clean the driveway a bit before we could enter. We both took a long hot shower. The next morning more snow was falling. It will be long summer before my relatives can see their lawn again!

After three weeks in Holland we are back in the USA and head north to Yellowstone.

May 2011, USA
29 April 2011 - 10 May 2011 Yellowstone National Park
First impression in the park: lots of snow, cold and sunny. Besides snowy bison we do not see much wildlife.

This harsh winter seems to be never ending and fresh snow is still falling. The snow drifts along the roads are sometimes over 16 feet high!
PJ drives into a snow bank while turning and bents the bumper and crushes the step. A bit difficult to get in and out of the camper now...

The snow plow is busy every day

The late spring is taking its toll from the animals. A bison walking on his last legs, drops into the sage. Slowly we watch him die, occasionally convulsing with its legs. The next morning a coyote wanders by and begins to gnaw at the carcass. The bears and wolves finish him off, but by then the rangers have moved the carcass much further into the field and it is not interesting for us anymore.

After a week we finally find a grizzly bear. And it is a good one; a beautiful creature who his busy with the carcass of a moose. Most times the bear has four legs in the air! What a comical bear.
Click here for a YouTube movie of this bear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJGGWM1CUAE

who called me comical?

A gorgeous red fox comes along, but takes off when the bear gets to close.

In the meantime we also have spent a day at the Ford garage in Bozeman to have two new fuel injectors installed.

It is going to take days before the pass is passable, so the East Entrance will be closed indefinitely. With the Cooke City entrance (northeast gate) also closed this meant we had to drive 250 miles (!!) around the park to be able to get back into Yellowstone! Six hours later we were back in the park at the Gardiner entrance.

13 May 2011 Yellowstone National Park
Again we could not find any wildlife, so we drove to the heart of the park (Fishing Bridge). Fellow photographers had just seen a grizzly bear with a spring cub. Great! We had to wait for another four hours before the bear and coy showed up again.

What a cutie! A befriended photographer told us that yesterday he had seen a big grizzly bear on a bison carcass in the river. He showed us the carcass and we decided to wait for action. To get closer to the carcass, we had to walk 50 yards through a forest. But the snow was still five feet thick and slowly melting, so very porous. When we checked out the path a few times we now and then dropped to our knees into snow. I decided to wear my insulated winter boots instead of my hiking boots, which are stored between the camper and the bed of the truck. I had wear then last week for the first time this year.
The bear suddenly appeared, so I quickly slide into my snow boots. In one of the boots the inner felt lining felt weird, but I had no time to look at it, we wanted to be at a spot along the river as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, several photographers had taken all the best places and we had to settle with shooting through the trees. I tried to create a kind of platform for PJ and I carefully stamped the snow with my boots, with minimal noise. However it was annoying that one inner boot was still crooked. I made room for PJ and stepped aside and dropped to my crotch into the snow! PJ was too busy photographing the bear, which was very nervous of noises and the clicking of the cameras. I could not move and if I tried to push myself up I even sank further into the snow. My legs became very cold and my crotch wet. The bear decided to call it a day and finally PJ could save me from my critical situation.

We walked back to the camper and immediately I took off my snow boots and tried to push the inner boot back into shape. I stuck my hand into the boot and felt something cold! Gross, what was that? I held the boot upside down an three dead mice fell on the laminated floor!!!
I screamed to PJ that he should come and see this. I held the boot upside down again and there were two more dead mice. With some paper towel around my hand I stuck my hand into boot and pulled out two more mice, but these ones were all squashed and bloody. I immediately began to retch. The idea that I had been pounding through the snow with SEVEN dead mice in my boot, brought up the bile. PJ helped me to clean out the vermin, but even one hour later I still started to gag when I thought of it. When had these mice come in? We wondered, we have been constantly in snow. Fortunately the mice were already frozen to death before I stepped into my boots.

The lack of balance caused our camper to start tearing apart, the counter is tilting and beams are breaking! Our camper definitely need support and PJ thinks the solution is a flatbed with rails. It will also give us more storage space, by which we can store the heavy stuff (like the generator) on the left side. After we have taken off the camper, the bed of the truck have to be removed.

PJ removes all the nuts and bolts, replaced electricity and the bed can be lifted off.

Uncle Bill used his tractor to lift the bed. When we will sell the truck, the bed has to come back and fortunately we can store it at Bill's place.

This is the extra storage we have created Not yet finished, but for now I am done...

Meanwhile we could borrow Bill's Lexus and we visit the park now and then. The bears are getting active and we even saw a wolf a couple of times. A black wolf tried to grab a bison calf, but mum stood her ground. And we saw a boxing match between marmots.

The grizzly makes a sharp curve and comes running towards the tree. We all hold our breath. The cubs are sensing that mum is coming and start to climb down. The reunion is out of sight, but the sow gives us a glimpse when she start nursing them on a snow bank. She looks relieved and when one of the cubs start to wander, she calls it back. After the nursing she starts walking away, but after a couple of steps she falls down again and cuddles her babies. She repeats this a couple of time. Then it is time to cross the meadow and while she climbs the steep snow hill we make some last pictures of her and the cubs. What a bear!

For the evening we are invited for a barbecue at the campground. Here we meet all these new friends, who live in Jackson Hole and surroundings.

Not everybody was born in Jackson Hole and PJ wonders out loud why they picked this place to live (on the south side of Teton NP). If we had a choice we would like to live in Gardiner, than we would have access to Yellowstone National park anytime and did not have to wait until the roads opens. The whole group fires up! They claim: "Teton National Park has everything; nice park rangers, beautiful mountains, bears, moose, owls, wolves, foxes and coyote puppies. Yellowstone is crowded with tourists and the park rangers are not nice".
We think that is not a fair opinion, because the south entrance of Yellowstone opens half of May and that is when the Jackson Holers are coming to the park. We have been 'playing' in Yellowstone already for a whole month without much tourists.

But they are right: Grand Teton has it all! The next morning (a little bit later than normal, because of a slight hangover) reveals the park itself in its full glory.

In the afternoon we hear a call on the scanner for assistance at a bear jam. A grizzly sow with triplets is grazing along the highway! It is the famous 15 year old grizzly #399 with red ear tags. She has been studied by biologists for years. This is the second time she has triplets. She is used to traffic and seems confident with the row of cars and the audience.

We see not only bears on the road, but also a newborn moose calf, still unstable on the spindle legs. We've never seen so small. The calf is not higher than mothers knees.

We we cannot let Yellowstone down and drive north to spent three days in this park. We take pictures of a sow grizzly with the cutest spring cub. He likes to climb on mothers back, while she is taking a nap.

And we take pictures of a grizzly at 'Steamboat Point' and then I realize what I miss at the Tetons:
the geisers!

Back in Grand Teton NP our new friends told us that just outside Grand Teton National Park in the Bridger-Teton National Forest a grizzly sow with a spring cub has been giving a show.
We went to that place and the bears are still around. We have been photographing this bear family for three days and little Elvis is like a bouncing ball, running around, playing with his mum, climbing trees and being just a very happy cub. His Elvis' moves are unforgettable, shaking his hips while standing on his hind legs and moving his arms like Elvis. There is a lot of loving and kissing between the bears. It was such a joy to watch, film and photograph them with just a handful of photographers.

Unfortunately the bears were cracker shelled by Fish & Game when they came to close to the road. Little Elvis changed after that, he was not an unprejudiced cub after that.
The worse thing was when we were reported feeding the bears! I think you cannot make a more offensive accusation to wildlife photographers than that. We have had it with ignorant tourists!

June 12 2011 - Grand Teton National Park
It was 7.30pm and we were driving the Teton Park Road south to Jackson Hole. It had been a rainy day and we had not seem much. The scanner started to crack up and we heard: "Wildlife patrol, on the northwest corner of Lake turnoff is a grizzly. Can you check it; it is #610 with her cubs". We could not believe our ears, hurray for the scanner and the person who was so specific. We made a u-turn as soon as possible and drove back. We still had an hour of daylight left. A big crowd had gathered and the sow was hiding with her cubs in the high willows. We parked our camper and started to walk along the road. Next thing we know the grizzly came out of the willows right where we were and made a sprint and started to pound the ground. In my innocence I thought she had a ground squirrel, but the 'squirrel' started to mewling and mama elk made an appearance. The grizzly had caught an elk calf! The rangers moved us to the other side of the road, which made it about 70-80 yards away. The calf kept crying for a while while the cow was running around. After the grizzly silenced the calf, the cow disappeared.

Our adventures in the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Park become to an abrupt end when we got the message from home that Claudia's brother-in-law is dying from cancer. Claudia takes a plane home immediately, PJ follows a week later. We stayed in the Netherlands for six weeks.

In July we read an interesting article about the two sow grizzlies we have been following:

Grand Teton National Park News releases by Jackie Skaggs
July 25 2011

Grand Teton National Park biologists report that an interesting turn of events occurred late last week when two female grizzly bears apparently “exchanged” one cub with one another. The two female grizzlies are related (mother and daughter), and have occupied overlapping home ranges since they both emerged from hibernation with their newborn cubs this past spring. The adoption or fostering of cubs between two female bears is rare, but not unprecedented. This behavior was documented in an article written by Mark A. Haroldson, Kerry A. Gunther, and Travis Wyman in a Yellowstone Science 2008 publication.

Fifteen-year-old grizzly bear #399 (a research number assigned to her in 2001) gave birth to three cubs during hibernation this past winter. Over the spring and summer months, she has traveled with her trio of cubs throughout a home range that she has occupied for several years. Five-year-old grizzly bear #610, born to #399 in 2006, also gave birth to two cubs of her own this year. These two female grizzly bears were previously radio-collared as part of a decades-long research study conducted by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. Bear #399 last wore a collar in 2006 and #610 shed her collar in 2010. Colored ear-tags remain on the bears, providing continued identification in the field.

The apparent adoption of a single cub occurred on or about July 21; the noteworthy event was confirmed by observations of #610 traveling with three cubs in the Willow Flats area of Grand Teton National Park, and later observations of #399 with just two cubs in an area further north of Willow Flats.

Biologists are not sure what caused the exchange of offspring, or whether this will be a temporary or permanent situation. However, these observations offer a fascinating glimpse into bear behavior. Scientists speculate that cub adoption in bears is an adaptive behavior that increases cub survival when they become separated from their mothers as a result of conflicts with other bears, the death of a mother, or other disruptive events.

The two female grizzly bears and their respective cubs have lingered near park roads over several months time, allowing visitors and local residents an exceptional opportunity to view wild bears in their natural environment.

We receive the message from home that Claudia's brother-in-law is dying from cancer. Claudia takes a plane home immediately, PJ follows a week later.