Jeff Wendorff » Trip Report

Baby Bighorn Sheep at Yellowstone

Jeff — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:51:31 +0000

I’ve seen quite a few Bighorn Sheep, but I rarely photograph them in the spring or summer as to me they always look best in the winter. I also really don’t care too much about the ewes. I find their appearance to be very alien and more than a little un-settling. Now the lambs that is a whole new story. In a word, adorable. They were so cute and fun to watch that I broke a cardinal rule and photographed despite some harsh light. If you are keeping tabs over these last few trip reports from Yellowstone, you know I had difficult weather to deal with. They were so cute that I had to photograph a few of these lambs. So enjoy them for the capture they are and sort of ignore the light.

The Bighorn lambs in these images are about 5 days old and already ready to leep great distances as well as run with their moms. Which is a good thing when you have Golden Eagles hunting them too!

In case you were curious:

Bighorn ram’s horns can weigh 30 lbs (14 kgm)—more than all the bones in his body combined.
They have split hooves which aid in balance and rough hoof bottoms for natural grip.
Can jump a length of 20 feet (6 meters) ledge to ledge

You can see all of my Bighorn Sheep photography and order prints…HERE.

[View with PicLens]

Here’s the map of the top secret location for finding the bighorn lambs! Ok, it isn’t really top secret, but it is where I found them most evenings.

Bear Photography from Yellowstone National Park

Jeff — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:27:15 +0000

I’ve only been to Yellowstone on 4 different occasions and 2 of those were this year. I’d only seen what someone told me was grizzly bear…it looked like a brown dot on the horizon! This spring, well alleged spring, things were far different for me. I saw grizzlys every day I was in the park and often multiple different bears. I am guessing that I saw bear on 10 occasions and of that 7 were most likely unique bears. Not bad for 4 days!

It was quite a rush to be able to photograph them on a couple of occasions. Of course having a long lens is essential and I was lucky several times to be at the right pull off at the right time to get some images. Still there are a lot of bears. I was surprised that I only saw 1 black bear and that was at a great distance…

You can see all of my bear photography and order prints…HERE.

In case you were curious:

The largest land mammal in North America
In 1800 there were 50,000 bears in the lower 48 states of which there are now 1300
Males can be 7ft tall and weigh upwards of 600 lbs
85% of their diet is plant life

[View with PicLens]

It was cool seeing the bears in virtually every part of the park. You can see where I photographed mine on this handy map. Since they are territorial, who knows you might still find them!

Bison Photography from Yellowstone National Park

Jeff — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:54:19 +0000

Yellowstone is such an incredible place and this is coming from someone that has spent way more time in Africa than in Yellowstone. It really is always full of surprises and one of things that I’ve learned is that you just take what the park gives you. I mean it is quite hard to say, Ok today is bison. OK, well you could probably do that, but the point is that the park is massive and not easily traversed with the zillions of tourists. Slow down and photograph what you see, in other words enjoy yourself!

I chose to go the park in May assuming that I would have gorgeous spring weather in the mountains, green grass, wildflowers and babies galore…oops! We have snow, snow and more SNOW! One morning when I got to the park I was informed that every road in the park was closed except from Madison to Old Faithful. Then one morning there was a rockslide closing the road to the Lamar Valley from Tower and of course the pass from village to Tower was still under 14 FEET of snow. Ahh, spring in Yellowstone!

BUT, that meant that despite the fact that it was memorial day weekend the park was relatively devoid of people. I photographed a grizzly by myself for about 20 minutes and the longest “animal jam” was about 15 minutes. No sweat.

There were quite a few baby bison, but not any great numbers. A friend was there a week or so after me and said that there were a lot of babies and equally bad weather. Still I managed to make some nice images.

You can see all of my Bison images and order prints…HERE.

In case you were curious:

The bison herd is now about 3500 in Yellowstone
From 1800-1890 men killed at estimated 65 Million bison
Adult bulls are 6 ft tall and weigh about 1 ton

[View with PicLens]

As is my custom, here is a map showing the locations in the park that I made my images.

Bird Photography at Yellowstone National Park

Jeff — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 14:51:42 +0000

I’ve only just started going to Yellowstone and have been loving it. I know I am late to the party, but when I was a kid and then once more as an adult, I found the traffic was simply unbearable and photography was almost impossible. Traveling the park in winter and even early spring fixed that problem, no people! Of course, things are also more difficult as roads are closed or you need specialized vehicles to get around. The other thing that you need is patience, and focus. Well when don’t you need those things for bird photography?

At Yellowstone the thing that I found was everyone is so busy looking for big game like bison and bear, the wee birds often go unseen. Several times I caused an inadvertent ”bird jam” as people were stopping in traffic to see what I was photographing, most left disgusted! I found that by simply ignoring things that were more than a foot tall helped. The other “trick” was to use every pullout along the road and look around to see what might be flittering by. Lastly the area around Old Faithful had quite a lot of birds and they were a bit more tolerant of people stopping to take a few pictures.

You can see all of my bird photography…HERE.

The park boasts 330 documented bird species, here are 9 of mine! Guess I need a lot more patience and focus!

[View with PicLens]

In case you are visiting the park, here is a map showing where I made the images.

Bird Photography Antelope Island Utah

Jeff — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:42:56 +0000

On my way to Montana, I spent an afternoon on Antelope Island in Utah. It is an easy drive from the airport and I’ve always wanted to see what I could photograph there. This was destined to be a quick trip as I needed to be on my way and it was also “drive by” photography (shooting out the car window) as I was quite un-prepared for the voracious no-seeums that had overwhelming numbers.

I was surprised by the lack of shorebirds along the 7.2 mile causeway over to the island, but with the insect problem, I wasn’t getting out anyway. Once on the island I drove the main roads and saw quite a number of species including chuker, meadowlarks, Upland Sandpiper on a boulder (this perch still seems crazy to me), magpies, bison, pronghorn, mule deer, Brewer’s Blackbird, Horned Lark and quite a few more.

It is a place that I would visit again once the temperatures get up in to the 90′s (the boiling point for the no-seeums) and give it another go.

In case you were curious about Antelope Island:

Antelope Island State Park, consists of 28,022 acres
It is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake measuring 15 miles long and seven miles wide at its widest point.
In 1969, Utah State Parks and Recreation created Antelope Island State Park with the purchase of 2,000 acres on the northern tip of Antelope Island; then in 1981, the rest of the island was purchased for recreational purposes.
It is home to some 500 Bison, Pronghorn Antelope, Bighorn Sheep and about 250 species of birds

[View with PicLens]

I’ve also attached a map of the locations for the images that I took on my trip to Antelope Island.

Washington State

Jeff — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:48:52 +0000

I spent the last week in Seattle and the San Juan Islands and just had a blast! First, the weather was stupendous. I’ve never been there when it was 75 and sunny everyday for a week. It really was just brilliant. It was also great because I got to hang out with my photo pal, Brenda Berry. She is a great portrait photographer and a lot of fun to hang out with.

Brenda and Jon have a great house on Bainbridge Island and I always find something to photograph in her yard, which always manages to annoy her because she never gets around to photographing her own yard birds! Here are a couple of favorites from this trip.

I’ve also always wanted to go watch the Orca’s in the San Juan Islands. With the weather being perfect and having some extra time, I made it happen on this trip. I left out of Bellingham aboard the Island Mariner. Very well run trip on a very large boat. The nice thing about this boat was that it was very stable, no rocking and rolling. This is a big plus for photographers and those without sea legs. The downside was even though fast for its size it can take a while to find the whales. The naturalist on board made the

time without whales entertaining and educational. I was happy to get a couple of bird shots as well as my first jellyfish photograph.

Of course the Orca’s are the stars out here and it was with some relief that we found them. Even though the success rate of seeing the whales is high, they are wild and you just never know. This was a very challenging shoot to say the least. Even though stable, the boat is moving, the whales are moving, the whales are underwater 95% of the time… You get the picture. So I was very happy to get a couple of keepers. My favorite is this with Mt Baker for a background. I was soo busy trying to get a shot that I didn’t realize that we were in line with the mountain until the naturalist asked if I got it in the images. I re-doubled my effort to make that happen and got a bit lucky.

I also took a trip out of Friendly Harbor aboard the Western Prince. This was a smaller and more intimate boat. It was a very fast boat and we were with the whales in a fraction of the time it took aboard the larger boat. I had a better time viewing the whales on this boat, but had less success in my photography. I would like a to go back and give it another try and would spend more time in San Juan and Friendly Harbor.

I am very excited to get back out there and give the orcas another shot!