The Animals of Yellowstone

Yellowstone has been protected as a National Park for 150 years. Every effort is made to let the animals be wild, even around the visitors. There are signs everywhere to not approach the animals and to not feed the animals, even the birds and squirrels. The result is that most visitors get to see wild animals on their visit. We did.

Yellowstone is rightfully known for its bison. The only continuously wild herd of bison in the United States lives in Yellowstone. Adler was pretty excited the first afternoon when he took this picture of a big bull resting in a wallow close to the road.

The next morning, on that same stretch of road along the Yellowstone River, we saw whole herds of bison.

Adler got this shot of cows and calves.

I took a photo of this bull who wasn’t the least concerned about the traffic passing.

It was quite evident that Yellowstone’s bisons are not at all afraid of people in vehicles.

The other animals you’re almost sure to see are elk. If you don’t get a shot of one grazing in one of the meadows…

just drive to Mammoth Hot Springs where they feel perfectly at home grazing on the lawns…

or relaxing in the shade of the buildings. Make no mistake, these are wild animals and everyone keeps a respectful distance.

We had Matey with us and he ignored the elk, but was totally enamored with these little guys. I think they were ground squirrels. They lived in holes in the ground but were only half the size of prairie dogs.

Then there are the less seen animals.

Like this bear. Adler got this photo. I thought it was a brown bear but Yellowstone has only black bears and grizzly bears, so this must be a grizzly. It was easy to spot the bear, because people were parked along both sides of the road watching as the bear foraged at the edge of the meadow.

I got this shot of this black bear. Again, traffic was stopped. You can see that iPhones are not the ideal instrument to get these photos.

Adler did a good job capturing this pronghorn antelope; and there wasn’t even any traffic there to alert us to an animal sighting.

You’ll have to take my word for it on our favorite sighting. The small, whitish blob between the two small pines closest to the front is a grey wolf. We spotted him early in the morning as we came to Lake Village.

Other folks who were there at the brink of the upper falls overlook identified this as a yellow bellied marmot. I just liked the way he would pop up and pose for a few seconds, then disappear only to pop up again a couple of feet away.

We were all happy with the numbers and variety of animals we saw.