Wolves

Ann and I like to joke about the “Wolfies” here at Yellowstone, folks who line up along side the road with their spotting scopes all day looking for, and occasionally seeing wolves.  You can tell the hard-core folks by the whip antennas on their car - once someone finds a pack, they call in and everyone congregates in hopes of getting a glimpse.  In reality, I don’t begrudge them their pleasures, I’m sure plenty is said about photographers - especially those (and we’ve been among them) that do the same thing at a particularly photogenic points at sunrise or sunset.  We generally avoid such crowds, but sometimes you have to do it because you want to do it, despite everyone else.  Most of the time we just go our way to find more secluded locations. And we continue to learn that when we do, the nature tends to come to us.  This time, it was wolves and although we had just gotten done with our photography and were, in fact, in our vehicle, there were wolves that led us to stop.  Admittedly, it is thrilling to see them, particularly how we did . . . but I doubt we’ll be joining the wolfie pack any time soon.  

On Wednesday morning, Ann and I had just finished our morning shoot at a couple of locations along Soda Butte Creek.  The first location was not far from the fork with the Lamar River, the other up-stream not too far from Pebble Creek Campground.  We had scouted both the previous afternoon for the morning session and figured we could do both of them the same morning.  Fortunately, snow was still in the surrounding mountains from the previous day’s inclement weather and there was mist by Pebble Creek.  It was a good morning of photography.

We made our way out of the creek bed to Beast, headed the quarter mile to Pebble Creek Campground to turn around, and headed back down the valley.  Right at where we had been parked for our second shoot there was a line up of cars - about a half dozen, no more - stopped in the middle of the road.  Now, we’ve seen elk there before, and know that bear can be around, so we stopped behind a car and started looking around.  When we realized they weren’t looking towards the brush where wildlife usually is active around here I started scanning towards the creek and sure enough, I saw movement.  Black, not light colored like a coyote (which we have another couple stories of this trip), so quite possibly a wolf.  Suddenly a second, and a third . . . yup, wolves.

I grabbed my point-and-shoot, which sits on a shelf right over the driver’s seat, then asked, “Ann, the big lens is right here isn’t it?”  “Yes, it’s in the bag on the floor between us.”  “And the back-up camera?” “In there with it somewhere.”  So I grabbed the big 100-400mm zoom, felt around for the camera body, found it and mounted the lens to the body.  I checked to make sure the optical stabilizer was on and started shooting.   They started moving . . . then stopped.  

I took a deep breath - stop, think.  I turned off the vehicle engine (I could now lean on the window frame and not introduce vibrations).  Then I thought about hand-holding and panning with that focal length.  Change the ISO up to 800 - hopefully that would do it.

Then they started moving again and all I could do is pray that the settings would do the trick.  (They did, the first are a bit blurry, the latter quite a bit sharper - none of these are from the first set of shots I did).

There were three of them - clearly one in charge, and the other two following.  The rear one was the slowest and kept stopping and looking behind it.  Why, we don’t know.   That forced the front wolf to stop and wait for the others to catch up

The image above is a crop of the image from below.  You can see that as they moved, they would get spaced out in a line.  They were making their way from a wooded area off to the right, next to where we were photographing on Soda Butte Creek, across a meadow.

For once we were probably lucky to have not been still photographing.  I doubt they would have come right next to the river (then again, there was that bison).  They probably would have passed us without us ever knowing - except for the cars that would have stopped.  We would have been in no position to photograph them (maybe they would have appeared in one of our wide-angle landscape shots as a dot).  At best, we’d be photographing them from the rear.  No, luck was with us to have us positioned to the side of their track, elevated not only by the road, but by being in Beast.

Once the three had congregated by the tree above, they took off again at a steady pace across the field to disappear into the brush and trees on the far side. 

This is why we have places like Yellowstone.  A place where, despite the tourist crowds, the wolfies, the fisher persons and, yes, the photographers, animals like wolves can thrive and change the landscape for the better (google “Wolf Reintroduction Changes Ecosystem in Yellowstone”), the presence of bears can mean you have to carry bear spray much of the time, and the bison periodically remind idiots not to get too close.  Watching a line of wolves track across the landscape is a sublime experience.