It was mid May and calving time in the Bison herds of Yellowstone and Teddy Roosevelt…And as the father of a 4-year-old and 5-year-old, I can really see the similarities in these wild babies and my kids…TONS of energy, lots of playing, stick close to mommy, and darn cute!

Aaaah! How cute! I love this shot. It really shows the bond between mother and calf. A little nuzzling for reassurance.

HISTORY OF BISON IN THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK
[from the official park website: “In 1956, 29 bison were brought from Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska and released in the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Here they roamed freely on 46,000 acres of park land and by 1962 the herd had increased to 145 animals. That year, 10 bulls and 10 cows were relocated to the 24,000-acre North Unit.”

“Though both units of the park can easily carry larger numbers of bison, park managers have currently set herd size at approximately 200 to 400 animals for the South Unit and 100 to 300 for the North Unit to maintain healthy range conditions.”

Two adolescent bulls go head to head in a play battle.
[From park website: “Cow groups usually consist of 20-60 animals composed of cows, bulls under 3 years, and a few old bulls. The herd is led by an older cow. As they graze, the group will travel 10-15 miles each day moving at a speed of 5-6 miles per hour. Most bulls live alone or in bachelor groups of up to 20 animals. Bulls tend to become more solitary with age.”

[From park website: “Cows usually conceive for the first time as three-year olds. Though calves can be born at any time of the year, the calving season usually begins in April after a 9 month gestation period. Calves are orange-red in color and are up and moving within 3 hours of birth. They stay very close to their mother for the first few weeks. Cows are very protective of their young. Eventually, calves venture further away from their mothers, playing with other youngsters in nursery groups, while always under the watchful eyes of other cows within the herd. After 3 months, the orange-red baby coloration starts to change to dark brown and the hump and horns begin to form. Calves remain with their mothers for about a year, or until another calf is born.”

LEARN MORE ABOUT BISON AT THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK’S WEBSITE HERE

Ryan and I often break up the 17 hour drive home to Minnesota from Yellowstone with a night and half a day in Teddy Roosevelt National Park. The 36-mile auto loop is a fantastic road for wildlife photography…And no crowds!
Prairie Dogs are truly charismatic critters. How can you not like them? Well, I guess cattle ranchers hate them as cows can step in a hole and break their legs. But they’ve been successfully eradicated on much of the private lands of the west.

We tried this unique shot last year but came up empty (Not every wildlife photo must be taken with a telephoto lens!). We placed our cameras with a wide angle lens near the mouth of a Prairie Dog hole…then we retreated to the hillside and waited to trigger the shutter remotely. But Prairie Dogs have interconnected tunnels with many exits/entrances, and they usually outsmarted us. And the same thing seemed to be happening to us this time, but after we had given up and were heading back to the car, one Prairie Dog seemed reluctant to go down his hole as I approached. Maybe curious, maybe young, maybe not too experienced, but “brave” enough to poke his head out to check out the “three-legged predator” just outside his home. “Click” …got the shot. [Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens at 16mm, f13 at 1/800, tripod with remote trigger]

The North Dakota badlands are much more lush and green than the South Dakota badlands [iPhone!]

Lark Sparrows are very common in Teddy Roosevelt but rare in northern Minnesota. It was a real treat to see and hear many along the auto loop. This guy posed in the tip top of a Rocky Mountain Juniper. [Canon 7D with Canon 400mm f5.6 lens, f5.6 at 1/250 (max flash sync speed), Canon 420EX flash and Better Beamer attachment (to extend the reach of the flash), handheld]

Western Meadowlarks are a symbolic bird of the grasslands of the American West. [Canon 7D with Canon 400mm f5.6 lens, f5.6 at 1/400, handheld from car (This is an exposure between firings of the flash…The flash needs to recycle after every firing, so it is best to set your exposure so even between firings you get a decent exposure of your subject.]

Check out those ears! Mule Deer, in fact, are named for their ears which are oversized as in Mules. It was a very dark, rainy, gray day so the color balance was a bit weird so I converted the image to black-and-white for better effect. [Canon 7D with Canon 400mm f5.6 lens, f5.6 at 1/640, handheld from car]

Part 5 of 6 from a mid October trip to North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

The fun doesn’t stop after the sun goes down! In reality, often the last thing you want to do on an exhausting photo trip is go back into the field after dark. You’re tired, and you know the alarm will go off WAY before sunrise but you do it. And it is always a blast!…The kind of fun that was hard to imagine in the film days.

Today’s digital SLRs are capable of amazing low-light images. In the “film days” we were limited to ISO 400 film…and that was often unacceptably grainy. Now I can shoot at ISO 12,800! (that’s not a typo) and there are other cameras that can go beyond that. The image above was taken at night with only a flashlight illuminating the hoodoos. I was able to make a relatively short exposure (30seconds) due to the High ISO capability of the Canon 7D (though not nearly as good as the Nikon D3 series). Of course, you always want to shoot the lowest ISO for the least amount of noise. In this case I used ISO 1600. A short exposure also limits the movement of the stars in the final image. Click on the image to get a better look at the stars.

How big do you think the hoodoos are in the image below? It is really a miniature landscape as each hoodoo is only 12-24 inches tall. Did you think they were many feet tall? The image was taken with the Sigma 10-20mm lens from a very low angle as I wanted the hoodoos to appear large and silhouetted against the sunset. I kept the camera moving in a circular motion while clicking the shutter and popping the flash. The flash froze the hoodoos but the slow shutter speed and motion blurred the sky colors.

The bottom image is an HDR created in Photomatix Pro. I like these surreal artsy images known as High Dynamic Range. Some people hate them. The program takes several of your images of a scene with a great range of contrast and combines them into one image with a medium exposure. In this case I combined only two exposures—one for the foreground and one for the sky. You can then tweak the look from natural to bizarre. Fun stuff. Note that it is the same hoodoos as the previous image and taken only minutes apart!

Stars & Hoodoos: Canon 7D, Sigma 10-20mm at 10mm, f4 at 30seconds, ISO 1600, flashlight, tripod
Hoodoos Sunset: Canon 7D, Sigma 10-20mm at 10mm, f16 at 1/20 second, ISO 200, flash at -2EV, handheld
HDR Hoodoos: Canon 7D, Sigma 10-20mm at 10mm, f16 at 2 exposures, ISO 200, tripod

Part 6 of 6 from a mid October trip to North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

After a successful morning shoot and a lunch at our grasshopper-infested campsite, we headed over to the South Unit visitor center for a history lesson on Teddy Roosevelt’s connection to this place (He said he never would have been president if it wasn’t for his ranching/cowboying experience in the badlands of North Dakota). It was now over 70 degrees when we headed back out on the wildlife loop. But there is more than wildlife along the 36-mile drive. Erosion formed the carved landscape so most of the scenery is BELOW the surrounding plains! This makes sunset/surise images difficult. You have to work to find good light at either end of the day. Here are a couple of my favorites.

The animal doesn’t always have to fill the frame! Is that news to you? More and more, I’m placing the animal smaller in the frame to show its environment and habitat. This gives a sense of place to the image. British wildlife photographer Andy Rouse just came out with a book called The Living Landscape and in it he talks about his evolution in wildlife photography to showing more habitat. Tom Mangelsen is another world-renowned photographer that also adeptly creates stunning images where the critter is small in the frame. He even does it within film-based panorama images!
Next time you’re out and had enough of frame-filling images, put away the long lens and grab your 70-200 (or wider!) and have some fun.

**Just a note: Just click on the images to see them in a larger format.

“How can I make a unique image of a Bison?” I thought to myself. On our many trips to Yellowstone, we’ve photographed hundreds of Bison over the years. It takes something new and unique to make us want to stop and get our gear out and even attempt to make an image. Great light, a stampede, rolling in dust, fighting. But how about a backlit resting Bison? Doesn’t sound like much, but I like the backlit red “mane” and the fact that he’s looking over the edge of a precipice.

The most exciting wildlife encounter we had on the trip wasn’t really even an encounter. We had followed a game trail down to the Little Missouri River in the North Unit. Ryan popped out of the brush and onto the mud flats bordering the water. Amongst the Raccoon tracks, Mule Deer tracks and Bison tracks he found huge cat tracks. Nearly 4 inches across. The lack of claw imprints (cats can retract their claws), the fact that the track was wider than long, and the oval shape of the toe prints led us to believe they were Mountain Lion/Cougar tracks. The park wildlife biologist later confirmed it and said that they are a rarely seen but regular visitor to the park feeding on Mule Deer and Porcupine!

The last image is a running blur of a Pronghorn. Try slowing the shutter speed and panning to create an image that shows speed. While Pronghorn can top 60mph, this one was just bounding away at less than half speed.

Bison Backlit: Canon 7D, Canon 400mm f5.6, f16 at 1/250, ISO 200, handheld from car

Mountain Lion tracks: Canon 7D, Canon 400mm f5.6, f16 at 1/90, ISO 800, handheld

Pronghorn blur: Canon 7D, Canon 400mm f5.6, f5.6 at 1/60 (Shutter Priority with auto ISO as I wanted only 1/60 second at f5.6), ISO 250, handheld

The North Dakota Badlands (Teddy Roosevelt National Park is just a portion of this landscape) are more vegetated than the stark South Dakota Badlands. In summer, these northern badlands can look downright lush. But it is still a graphic landscape where patterns come to life in the shadows and highlights of sunlit scenery. These three images just seemed to work better as black and whites. I simply converted them in Aperture 3 and adjusted the red, green and blue channels and tweeked levels and curves and contrast.

Some of the wild horses are handsome animals, others, like this one, are creatures of the landscape, rough and untamed and unkempt. The round rock is called a “cannon ball” concretion. It formed as minerals were deposited around a core within a substrate rock. We found a “congregation of concretions” in the North Unit of the park. I like the contrast of the round rock and the erosional ridges. Another image that just seemed to work better in black and white is the mud cracks along the edge of the Little Missouri River…A very abstract piece of nature’s art.

Mud cracks: Canon 7D, Canon 70-200mm f4 at 200mm, f16 at 1/60, ISO 400, tripod
Wild Horse: Canon 7D, Canon 400mm f5.6, f8 at 1/1000, ISO 200, tripod
Cannon Ball Concretion: Canon 7D, Sigma 10-20mm, f16 at 1/500, ISO 400, handheld

We had planned on going out to Isle Royale in Lake Superior for a 4-day photo trip, but the ship captain called in mid September and said we were the only three passengers for two weeks on either side. So he was packing it in for the season on October 2nd. Time to make a new plan.

 
I suggested Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota. I had done a couple backcountry hiking trips out there many years ago and remember all the interesting wildlife including Wild Horses, Bison, Elk, Black-tailed Prairie Dogs, Pronghorn Antelope, Bighorn Sheep, and how can we not include the Rattlesnakes and “Horny Toads” (actually Northern Short-horned Lizards). The land is more vegetated than the South Dakota Badlands and so—even though it’s still badlands—it is more hospitable to critters.

 
Ryan Marshik and I drove all night (9 hours) from Duluth, arriving at 4:30 am—two hours earlier than expected due to two factors; 1) MapQuest said it would take 10 hours but we had no traffic and no road construction and only stopped for gas. And 2) we counted on finding a breakfast spot in the early morning to eat a giant, greasy, gut-filling meal. But not even Dickinson had an all night diner, and Medora’s lone cafe in the off-season, is only open Monday through Wednesday (!).

 
So after an uncomfortable two-hour nap in the car, we headed out on the 36-mile loop. We found a heard of Bison in the campground and a flock of Wild Turkeys on the flats but this was before there was “shooting light.” A side trip up a dirt road towards Buck Hill netted us a mellow and large-racked Mule Deer buck. We followed him over a couple hills (lower photo). Mule Deer have dichotomously branched antlers unlike Whitetails which have one main beam with several tines coming off it. Muleys also have a unique escape gait in which they literally seem to bounce across the landscape, all fours in the air at one time (see photo below). Their name comes from their large, mule-like ears.

 
A band of Wild Horses next caught our attention.  They certainly have a different unkempt look compared to domestic horses. Each little band has a leader (thanks Chris!) who controls the group. He is usually the one that keeps a sharp eye on little humans with big cameras. The range of horse colors is amazing…some resembling Apaloosas, some sharing the color pattern of a Holstein cow! Wild Horses had been in the area for nearly a century but disappeared in the mid twentieth century. The current stock was reintroduced from Montana in the 1970s.

 
Our last stop before lunch was one of the many Prairie Dog towns that dot the park. It was great fun just sitting in their midst and watching their antics. I especially liked their alarm yip, where they would stand up, throw their head back and give a sharp yip. It is executed with so much force that I even saw one guy flip over backwards! If Prairie Dogs can show an embarrassed expression, this guy had it all over his face. See top photo.

 
And this was just the first morning! I will post several more journal entries from this quick 3-day trip in the coming days.
p.s. You can always click on a photo to see it in a larger format.

 
Prairie Dog yipping: Canon 7D, Canon 500mm f4 and 1.4x teleconverter, 1/1500 at f5.6, ISO 200, tripod with Whimberly head

Mule Deer buck head-on: Canon 7D, Canon 400mm f5.6, 1/500 at f5.6, ISO 320, handheld

Wild Horses: Canon 7D, Canon 400mm f5.6, 1/1000 at f5.6, ISO 100, tripod

Mule Deer bounding: Canon 7D, Canon 400mm f5.6, 1/30 at f9.5, ISO 100, handheld