The drive from Lovell, Maine to Jackson, Wyoming is just under 2500 miles, and beaver live in both places. I didn’t actually see any in Wyoming, but we found fascinating evidence of their presence. New to me was a little dam made of pebbles only, just enough to create the sort of terracing effect that makes the stream deep enough to float logs down.
Here it is in closeup. Mark, my guide, says that they may start like this and then build a larger structure on top with logs.
Personally, I would have guessed it was an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture, perhaps secretly constructed at night.
Another day, some distance from water, we found all that was left of a beaver that must have been killed and carried some distance:
The orange color is iron, which makes the enamel extremely strong. Notice the gap between the huge incisors and the back teeth: a beaver seals its lips behind the incisors, so it can carry branches without getting a mouthful of water. Nearby we found the lower jaw, and we slid the lower incisors out all the way to see how much tooth was there in reserve as the beaver wears away its teeth with all that chewing. The teeth grow throughout its life.
You can also see that the back of the incisors is not orange, and has worn away more quickly than the front, creating a very effective wedge-shaped cutting edge.
One more photo for fun. Close to the beaver skull was the femur (I think) of something BIG, bison or moose:
Pronghorns tend not to make the headlines. They are not endangered (750,ooo or so still around), not THAT big, not excitingly dangerous, just dapper little antelopes …. except they aren’t.
Their scientific name is Antilocapra americana, which means American goat-antelope, but they are neither goat nor antelope, and quite unrelated to any other animal in the world. I watched a male with his harem of females:
The buck has these sculptural black horns, which turn out to be rather unusual. The San Diego Zoo website says (abbrieviated) “The horns of the pronghorn .. . are a cross between horns and antlers. True antlers are made of bone and shed each year; true horns are made of compressed keratin that grows from a bony core and are never shed. The pronghorn’s are a hybrid: the sheath is made of keratin but the horns shed yearly. True horns have only one point, not the prongs or forks that antlers have. Yet the male pronghorn’s horns can grow to be 10 inches long with a forward-facing prong. Female pronghorn have tiny horns” as you can see here:
The buck was very interested in his does, and doing the rounds. If one seemed to be receptive, he would scent the air around her, smacking his lips:
If she is receptive, she raises her tail, and he follows her:
still sucking the air:
and when she stands still,
he mounts her briefly.
After much sniffing around, and just this one apparently successful mating, he looked first triumphant,
but then exhausted:
Mark took a video on his phone through his scope of another rather desultory attempt:
What I really wanted to see was them running: they can run at 60 mph, and keep it up for longer than a cheetah. They achieve this with specially adapted limbs, extremely large lungs, and the ability to maintain a high rate of blood circulation. Alas for me, they were calmly grazing, with no reason at all to run off.
You’d think there would be a sports car named after the Pronghorn, rather than the Mustang. And guess what, after this idea occurred to me I googled around and discovered I was not the first person to think of this:
On our last day in Yellowstone we woke to the first proper snow of the season, and after a few hours they closed the park entrances.
Instead of leaving to the south we had to exit to the north, drive up to Bozeman, Montana, and loop around to the West of the park back to Jackson, which took all day.
But the morning after the snow the clouds lifted, and there were the Tetons for the first time, as a parting gift before my flight home. The Tetons rise straight out of the valley with no foothills to blur their lower slopes, creating a dramatic and forbidding barrier.
Jackson Valley is at an altitude of 6,800 feet, and the highest peaks in the Tetons are 13,770 feet. This early snow blanketed just the upper slopes of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort ski area, which gets an average of 500 inches of snow a year.
I stayed with generous friends, so I end with the view from their house. How shall I ever repay them?
Black Bears, Ursus americanus, are properly black where I live in Maine, but out west they come in many shades. In The Tetons and in Yellowstone I saw black-hued ones in the far distance on two occasions (one of which I personally spotted first through the scope at least a kilometer away, eliciting a high-five from Mark), but my closest encounter was with a walnut-brown mother and two matching cubs.-
They were coming down a steep hillside across a gully from us, and Mark using his scope/cellphone combo got this video:
Then the mother crossed the gully (and the road) to the next hillside
followed by the cubs, in a big hurry,
and they headed off into the woods,
where they hung out for some considerable time, foraging:
The cubs would have been born in the den in mid-January to early February while the mother was still hibernating, so they are now about 8 months old. Two is the usual litter.
She probably weighs 150 pounds; males can be twice that.
She is now building up her body weight to survive another long winter in hibernation. On this occasion she was eating snowberries:
The cubs will spend one more winter with her before she chases them off in the spring.
PS Yellowstone is vast, 3500 square miles, but it has very few roads, and vehicles must stay on those roads. You can hike, but the animals are thinly spread, so you mostly see them from vehicles. As a result, when a bear comes close enough to the road to be easily visible, bedlam ensues. Cars screech to a halt, people leap out, the rangers arrive to control the crowds. Not my preferred way to see wildlife, though I am one of the tourists in the vehicles adding to the problem. You have to wonder why the animals ever go near the roads, given how much back country they have to roam in, and that feeding the wildlife is strictly forbidden and well policed.
The unassuming mule deer is sometimes called the grey ghost of the forest (a nickname it shares with the unrelated African kudu).
They are a sub-species of black-tailed deer, Odocoileus hemionus, and are limited to areas west of the Missouri River, in contrast to the white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, found over most of the eastern US, but rare in the West. (though we did see one! ). The mule deer’s tail isn’t actually black, which would make it useless as an alarm mechanism, but it has a black tip:
They’re called mule deer because of their large mule-like ears:
Here is an actual mule for comparison!
When an adult male materializes out of the forest he is imposing, even at a mere 3 1/2 feet at the shoulder (much smaller than an elk). He can still weigh in at up to 330 lbs.
and he can have pretty large antlers, this one has six points:
Their facial masks vary widely, and some have black lines down their spine or at the base of their tail. The male above has rather quizzical “eyebrows” that reminded me of Mr. Bean. The young 3-point male below has a chic black V on his forehead and a black spinal stripe:
The young are usually born starting in late May and are now 3-4 months old, miniatures of their doting parents:
Sometimes romance seems to have been delayed, and this fawn still has its reddish color and its spots, meaning it can’t be more than 2 1/2 months old.
Winter will be a challenge: this fawn will have to keep up since they can migrate as much as 150 miles south (one travelled 240 miles), the longest land migration of any ungulate in the Lower 48.
*Mules tend not to get a good press, but my title is from a poem written to a pet mule. It is not great poetry, nor is it about a mule deer, but I include it here to demonstrate that even a mule can be loved by someone. The newspaper observes that “it is in blank verse, which seems to be the only literary method for successfully treating the mule.”
LINES THAT FIT A MULE Wrexham and Denbighshire Advertiser, 1891 By Bill Nye
Oh, lovely, gentle, unobtrusive mule, Thou standest idly, ‘gainst the azure sky, And sweetly, sadly singest like a hired man. Who taught thee thus to warble In the noontide heat and wrestle with Thy deep, corroding grief and joyless woe? Who taught thy simple heart Its pent-up wildly warring waste Of wanton woe to carol forth upon the silent air?
I chide thee not, because thy Song fraught is with grief-embittered Monotone and joyless minor chords Of wild, imported melody for thou Art restless, woe-begirt, and Compassed round about with gloom, Thou timid, trusting orphan mule!
Few joys, indeed, are thine, Thou thrice-bestricken, madly Mournful, melancholy mule. And he alone who strews Thy pathway with his cold remains Can give the recompense Of festering and injurious woe. He who hath sought to steer Thy limber, yielding tail Anigh thy crupper band Hath given thee joy, and he alone. ‘Tis true, he may have shot Athwart the zodiac, and, looking O’er the outer walls upon The New Jerusalem, have uttered vain regrets; Thou reckest not, O orphan mule, For it hath given thee joy, and Bound about thy bursting heart, And held thy tottering reason To its throne.
Sing on, O mule, and warble In the twilight grey, Unchidden by the heartless throng. Sing of thy parents on thy father’s side, Yearn for the days now past and gone, For he who pens these halting, Limping lines to thee Doth bid thee yearn and yearn and yearn.
I have seen moose in Maine over the years, but always without those iconic antlers: either cows, or bulls after they have dropped their antlers. Hallelujah, in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming I finally saw bull moose in their full glory.
It wasn’t easy. The biggest one I saw was just turning his back on me to wander nonchalantly back into the deep forest, so I got barely a glimpse and no photo.
The second one was high on the hillside about 300 metres away: he is the little black dot halfway down and left of centre.
When I zoomed in you could admire his rack and his beard, but not in close-up.
And then he decided to settle down under a tree to chew the cud:
The next day, though, a different male decided to travel across the landscape in full view close by, and here he is:
Their muzzle always reminds me of a carthorse, and I have an urge to hold out my palm with a carrot on it. Probably a bad idea. Anyway, this one is in his prime, between five and ten years old.
It is very hard to age a moose by its antlers, but they don’t get this butterfly (or split-palm) shape until around 5 1/2, and then as they age the antlers dwindle again.
The forward pointing portions are to protect their eyes and faces in dominance displays, though they rarely actually fight. The “beard” is in reality a flap of skin, more properly called a dewlap, or bell, and it is found in both males and females, though it is bigger in males.
No-one really knows what it is for. It may help to spread the animal’s scent during mating season. Bull moose will scrape a depression in the ground, urinate in it, and then lie down in the resulting fragrant slop. A muddy dewlap is a good way of dispersing the enticing pheromones to passing females. In this movie, again taken by Mark with his iPhone/scope combo, you can see how the dewlap flops around:
PS Here is a graphic of the different stages of antlers; the chap in my close-ups carries a fine example of the final stage:
PPS A depressing appendix. Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a prion disease (like mad cow disease) that affects the brains and spinal cords of moose, elk, and deer. First identified in Colorado in 1981, it has now reached the Greater Yellowstone area. It is probably spread through bodily fluids, is slow-growing, and the early symptoms are not obvious. It is always fatal, and is considered a serious threat to the populations of all these animals. We can only hope that they acquire some resistance to this scourge.
Eyes on the Wild 