Site Report: Yellowstone National Park

Visits

• 2012-07-12: I drove to Billings Montana to pick up Barbara early in the morning. After buying some pillows, we headed out to the wilderness for our camping (with pillows) adventure. My primary goal in visiting Yellowstone was to find and photograph wolves. Everyone back home was pretty dismissive of the possibility, but that will never stop me. So, about the wolves, we spent most of the afternoon in the Lamar Valley looking for them. At one point, we spotted a couple of Coyotes (including one with a radio collar), and that kept us on edge. I was starting to think that we would not see the wolves. We found a group of wolf spotters who had seen a wolf half an hour before. But there would be no wolves for us that night. We tried again, leaving even before sunrise. There was a gray fox just outside our cabin, so now we had two canids and no wolf. After spending most of the morning waiting for wolves, we decided to take an easy win and check out a river otter family in a lake nearby. After some great viewing of River Otters, we dropped by the wolf location for one last look. On the side of the road, we saw a bunch of people with spotting scopes, and sure enough, there was a wolf wandering around in the river bed. After a bit of time and repositioning, the wolf crossed the road right behind our car! For the rest of our trip to Yellowstone, we took a few short hikes. We were not successful in finding brown bears other than a couple of tiny dots in a spotting scope. We had some trouble with testy bison. It rained for the whole afternoon. There was a power outage, and we nearly were stuck sleeping in the car. Finally we found a camping spot late at night. No one had even heard of Lark Buntings or Chestnut-collared Longspurs. Birds 12, Scott 9

Species Seen

Lifelists

• North America
• United States
• World

Trips

• Moving the Car