Wednesday, June 3, 2015

I signed up for 8 more days in the campground this morning.

Once again, it was out to the Lamar Valley early to see if anything was on what's left of the carcass. Nothing. Someone drove by and said they were seeing wolves further up the valley, so I went and saw one – a yearling of the Lamar Canyon pack. It wasn't doing much, just nosing around. We lost sight of it in the woods.

Then, Rick McIntyre, the wolf researcher gave a talk about that pack of wolves. I had heard it before, but it's always interesting.

Next I planned to go into Cooke City and order a point and shoot camera from Amazon, but I kept getting distracted. First were the coyote pups. I stopped there just to look and ended up staying for a couple of hours talking to a retired couple from New York. They are traveling in a van to Alaska – by way of the Grand Canyon. They are planning to take 6 months for the whole loop. We talked about trips and photography and cameras.

As we were talking, someone shouted as they drove by that several wolves were coming down Amethyst Creek. That leads up to where the Junction Butte pack has their den, so that meant they were coming down to the carcass. They were the ones that killed it, so they knew where it was. No other wolves or bears had visited it.

We followed them down the creek and a ways up the valley when we lost them in the heat haze – maybe 3 miles away. So, I got in the truck and went up there. Sure enough, there were 5 wolves on and around the carcass. The heat waves off the grass made it almost impossible to focus and get a good photo. I watched for a while and Rick gave another talk – this time about the Junction Butte pack.

Rick is kind of like the Jane Goodall of wolves. She watched chimps for over 20 years and because of her observations, the understanding of chimp behavior underwent major changes. The same can be said for Rick. He's watched the wolves here in Yellowstone for 20 years and in Denali for 15 before that. His observations and notes have changed what we know of wolf behavior in major ways. It's because of his work that we now know that the alpha female is the leader of the pack. Before, the alpha male was thought to be the leader. His observations showed that when a new alpha male comes into a pack, he will adopt all of the offspring of the previous male. That wasn't known before. He's documented territorial battles nobody had seen before. His talks are always interesting.

After that, I finally got back to camp, had lunch and then went out and ordered the camera. After I got back, I needed to do chores – fill the fresh water tank and dump the wast water tanks. I had an audience:

He was about 50 feet from the trailer and I walked about 20 feet from him twice.

Tomorrow will probably be a laundry day and I'll post the last few days of the blog.