Creatures great and small

The mood lightened and the sun came out during the week as we witnessed the birth side of nature’s equation rather than the death. Puffy cumulus clouds floated in a cerulean sky, reflected in temporary ponds that were gone the next day. We remained in our scenic campsite at Mammoth Hot Springs, rather than move into Pebble Creek, the campground that served as last year’s wolf watching base. We visited to find it was half-gone, flooded and filled with deadfall trees. We visited with Ray, the camp host, who still planned to open on June 11 – and did -- although some of the sites have disappeared.
Also gone are the Druid wolves, the pack that introduced so many Yellowstone visitors to wolf-watching. Disease, death by rival wolves and shooting ended the legendary reign of the pack that inspired both film and book. Their survivors are scattered and unaccounted for and watching wolves in Yellowstone is not as easy as it once was. At their peak some seven years ago Yellowstone wolves were estimated at 170 in number. There are fewer than 100 today.
We were fortunate to witness a wolf pair – one black, one gray – chase a grizzly that had evidently strayed too close to their den. As the bear wandered off, the wolves rubbed noses in greeting, viewable even at our distance of well over a mile away. Leaving the valley we spotted a coyote just off the road, so intent on hunting she ignored us. Another day brought the sighting of an entire coyote family with four playful pups.
In a Lamar Valley meadow we saw an hour-old pronghorn calf tear through the sage after its mother, already able to run faster than most humans. The warm afternoon prompted a play date for a herd of young bison mothers, who butted heads, galloped in circles and chased each other back and forth across the highway a half-dozen times in a game of buffalo tag, their calves galloping close behind.
We saw a badger den with three youngsters raising comically-striped faces to the sun and wrestling briefly before disappearing back down their den. Another day brought a close view of an adult badger, a strange-looking creature that reminded us of an armadillo with lots of fur. He trotted back and forth between two excavations, throwing earth in the air as he dug energetically.
Watching for wolves, we saw another badger trot by with one its young in its mouth, moving to a new den. Once the coast was clear of their predator, four young Uinta ground squirrels emerged from a hole and surrounded their mother, standing erect as meerkats.
Driving into Mammoth village, we were stopped by rangers who held up traffic to allow an elk and new calf, born two hours earlier outside their office, to cross the road. Unlike the new pronghorn, the elk calf struggled mightily to follow its mother, testing wobbly legs gingerly.
“Regarde!” said a French woman to her husband. “Peut-etre deux mois?”
“Non,” I told her, “Deux heures. Il ne peut pas marcher bien.” “Not two months -- two hours. He can barely walk.”
But the prize sighting of the week was the one we’d heard about all the way down in Grand Teton park: a grizzly sow with four cubs, a number rarely seen. The sow browsed for food far below us with cubs in tow, the fourth cub noticeably smaller than the others. The small cub bounded along, always bringing up the rear as the group moved through the brush. An hour and a half after we first began watching the bears, we moved to another viewing spot up the hill in time to see the mother appear at the edge of a lake, rolling on her back to allow the little ones to feed. The scene of domestic bliss was a lovely contrast to all the predation we’d been seeing, although the grizzly mother was undoubtedly killing other animals’ offspring to feed her own. The sow stood up and allowed the runt to climb on her back for a ride, a maternal gesture we’re told she often employs to allow the littlest griz to keep up with the rest of the family.
One evening we visited the spot where we’d seen a black bear last spring followed by a hefty cinnamon male looking for romance. Apparently he found it. We looked up the wooded hill and saw a black sow with two frolicking cubs: one was black and the other cinnamon brown.