Animals and the Rockies

When we embarked on our Rocky Mountain adventure, Jill and I agreed that two animals we wanted to see were mountain goats and big-horned sheep.  A bear would be nice, and anything else would be "gravy".  On the third day out we got our mountain goats.  Yes, I admit it's a stretch, but we could see them nicely with binoculars.  If you click on the picture, you may very well see five of them.

The big-horned sheep didn't come until several days into the venture into Waterton NP, but when they showed up, they REALLY had a presence. There were three of them, and they were grazing in town in the schoolyard and then across the street!

We got the bear in Waterton, too, as we were driving up the road on a field trip.

Besides the "big three" we got some nice bonuses.  A mule deer and her newly born fawn took up residence beside our motel, and we could watch from the bedroom window.

As the fawn got more mobile it was interesting to see how much its stance mimicked that of its mother.  If Mom looked or acted a certain way, so did baby.

I'm a birder, and I got three "life" birds on the trip, meaning that was my first-ever sighting of that species.  Rarely do I get a life bird as cooperative as this dusky grouse (recently split from the spruce grouse as a separate species).  This bird practically sat on my shoe at one point.  I wasn't able to get pictures of the other two life birds, the calliope hummingbird and the sage grouse.

There were the usually quotas of rodent species.  This little Canadian ground squirrel was living under one of the buildings at Lake MacDonald Lodge in Glacier NP.  Sassy little things!

We also saw, but weren't able to get good photos of, a coyote at the edge of a den riding herd on two pups as well as a small herd of bison.  It was a good trip for wildlife spotting.