Friday, January 30,2015

This was the coldest day yet. I saw temperatures of -4 several times this morning. It was bright and sunny most of the day, however.

On my usual search for the wolf watchers, I stopped in the Lamar Valley for this photo of the low lying fog:

I finally found the watchers at Slough Creek:

They were watching some wolves lounging (with the phone through the scope):

Later, we saw more wolves preparing to nap:

That's pretty much all the wolves did today. We saw and heard these howling for a bit, but mostly they just lay about.

I had been having trouble getting the camera attachment to work properly with the scope, and today Doug Mclaughlin, the man I bought the scope through, was there (he's the 4^th from the left in the picture above). He looked at it and said I was using the wrong eyepiece. I had the other one back at the room, but that was an hour's drive away, so I thought I would fix it when I got back in the evening. The instructions aren't very clear on how things are supposed to got together and I figured I would have to fiddle with it some. Well, later, I met a man who had the same setup as mine and I got a look at it. Immediately it was clear how the parts fit. Since it was only 12:30 and all the wolves would be napping for the next few hours, I decided to go back to the motel and get the part.

On the way back, I encountered a coyote and it made an OK test for my fix. Not great because I was looking into the sun, but it would have to do:

That's better than I had been able to do previously.

Then, it was back to watching the first wolves sleep, hoping they would wake and do something interesting. They didn't.