Bison Bison

 The Bison of Yellowstone National Park are the ugliest beautiful creatures among the many we saw in our latest visit to the Land of Fire and Spit.  For the first time I was able to visit Wyoming in a winter wonderland of wildlife activity.  We viewed Wolves, Coyote, Trumpeter Swan, Geese, Bald Eagle, Buffalo, Big Horned Sheep, Elk, and Mule Deer.  Still, I may favor the Bison as my overall favorite.  I love their slow landscaping as they peruse the warm thermal areas, and their masks of snow as they dig through drifts to reach meals.  They are the greatest contradiction; a species that looks as though they should never have survived the ice age 10,000 years ago, yet they also narrowly escaped extinction by man a hundred years ago.  Of the millions that once roamed North America, Bison bounced back from just 800 around the turn of the 20th century, to an estimated 200,000 currently roaming the U.S. and Canada.  

Yellowstone in the winter was gorgeous.  There were a lot of utterly quiet moments, where I walked in the snow at night, or out in a forest snowshoe adventure.  Compared to the peak summer months, Yellowstone winter felt like the park was just as busy as it should be, and the animals ran the house.

You should check out my previous Bison pictures if you haven't seen them.

Ants!

 As the weeks go by, I am still working on a lot of photos from my summer in the parks.  In Grand Canyon one night, I noticed a tree covered in ants.  It seemed as though two rival colonies were attacking each other, and so we watched for the better part of an hour. 

 These ants were tiny, most could fit on the tip of a pencil.  Chuck, Federico and I took turns with a special macro lens, the MPE-65, to take such detailed shots.  We also lit the scene with flash units.  The ants went on all night, and when I woke up in the morning, you could see little curled carcasses still stuck to the tree!