November 23, 2024
Wildlife photographers occupy a special place in my heart. One winter evening at a café in Gardiner, Montana,
I passed a table of men dressed in camo with impossibly long telephoto lenses, waiting for their meal. I had to stop. “You must be here to photograph wildlife (duh). What’s the action been like?” “Today was a lucky day”, said the chatty one, introducing himself as Jeff. “A good day. We’ve been here a week”. A week. They had just been out all day in Yellowstone NP waiting for wolves and elk and moose to present themselves. All day. In one spot. In the snow. And the cold.
In Montana one must spend lots of time outdoors in winter and exhibit great patience to earn one’s wildlife photographer patch. I’ll never earn one. I’m not patient, and I’m certainly not very tolerant of extreme weather! I have five pairs of gloves and three pairs of boots in my closet, the result of trying to find the perfect apparel to make ventures into the winter outdoors comfortable. I’ve thrown in the towel. There’s no such thing. I’m therefore most definitely not a wildlife photographer. And yet…I love going to places where I think I may see animals in the wild and see them close enough for my measly 70-200mm telephoto lens. Sometimes it’s even cold.
I like animals. I was raised on a farm and had my own hogs and sheep. Hogs are cool. Sheep are not. I appreciate those barnyard minions. They have personalities; their antics make me smile or laugh out loud. In a strange way I love them. The same is true of animals in the wild.
I’ve never seen a grizzly or a wolf, though I’ve read about them. I did once see a three-legged coyote limping along a highway in Yellowstone, looking woefully at passing cars, as if asking for help, or at least some food.
I so wish to see a male moose with his huge rack. I’ve seen elk but not in rut. I missed this year’s window both in Yellowstone and the Bison Range.
I surprised a young cow moose one day while driving down a gravel lane in the Sula area. She was in a small stream next to the road, very close. My pulse quickened. I slowed the car and rolled to a stop. A photo op looked promising. I raised my camera, sneakily, from inside the car. And yet, she seemed to know what I was up to, and before I could press the shutter, she launched herself out of the water and took off into a willow thicket.
I have seen black bears, but in Montana that’s hardly worth mentioning. I was sitting reading on my patio the other day when out of the corner of my eye I caught lumbering my way what I assumed was my neighbor’s Bernese mountain dog. Nope. It was a large black bear waddling by no more than ten feet from me. It didn’t bother to pause or give me a look until I got up to see if cubs were around (they weren’t). Neither my phone nor my camera was handy.
I’m learning to expect the unexpected. On my most recent visit to Gardiner I was walking back to my hotel from dinner with a box of leftover food when I rounded a corner to come face to face with a female elk and her calf grazing along a fence. That gal was tall! We stared each other down, eyeball to eyeball. She made a move for that box of food. I retreated to the other side of the street.
I did not know that elks' antlers become a bloody mess when they shed their velvet. I have a distant shot to prove it. Sometimes that’s why I take wildlife photos – to prove I saw what I saw.
Pronghorn are elusive. They are shy and fast, flashing their white tails as they bounce away. But I have gotten lucky a couple of times.
I appreciate the bison. The story of their near extinction and how they were saved is compelling. When I first moved to Montana, I photographed them indiscriminately. Every scene, every look was exciting. Soon, however, all photos started looking the same: bison with their oversize drooping heads, beards touching the ground, tiny eyes barely visible, multi-colored coats that look elegant in winter and ratty by late summer. These days I wait until they give me something new and interesting. One day on the Bison Range, I came upon a herd on the move, spread across the road. I stopped my car and rolled down the window. One big guy trudged by so close he almost touched my car. He gave me the side-eye, grunted loudly in my face, and moved on without breaking stride. My pulse raced. My camera remained on the seat beside me.
Birds are another thing entirely. You really can’t photograph birds “incidentally”. At least not the kind I see, except for the great horned owls. The most exotic birds I have photographed are the flamingos in the Camargue Preserve in France. The boardwalk brought me exhilaratingly close to them.
I've seen the famous Camargue horses. Not wild at all, they were grazing in a meadow. No romance there, though they had interesting eyes. Turns out you have to pay big money to be taken to photograph them racing through the Rhone delta surf, manes flying.
I don’t consider my wildlife photos masterpieces, but I enjoy the experience and am sometimes pleasantly surprised. I want to share them, so I have put some images in a gallery. Click here to go to the gallery.
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