Tag Archives: Grand Teton National Park

Pop Goes The Marmot

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One of the amazing things about young yellow-bellied marmots that live in trees is their incredible ability to have fun. Many people don’t realize that marmots can and do live in places other than rocky outcroppings and boulder fields. This marmot family that consists of a large brook-no-nonsense female and her three youngsters known as pups, have been living in a tree in a meadow in Grand Teton National Park  all summer.

They have taken over a large fallen hollow tree that is leaning against a large boulder at a 45° angle at the meadow’s edge. The pups are large enough now that she leaves them home alone and goes out into the meadow to forage. While she is gone the pups spend the day inventing new games to play while they’re hanging around the house. The pup has learned a new game called “Whack a Marmot” and spent most of the afternoon popping out of the various holes in the tree trunk. In a day or so he won’t be able to use that hole as he will have gained enough weight from the females milk and eating the browse she brings back that he won’t be able to shove his chubby little head through the hole anymore.

Their home had made the list of places to stop and stare at wildlife and was constantly besieged with curious visitors that wanted to see exactly how the marmot family lived. After the female came home and found humans looking in the open end of the tree trunk and dumping Fritos into the opening in a vain attempt to get the kids to come out, she called a meeting of the family and told the kids they were bugging out. She sent them to the farthest inner reaches of the log with dire warnings as to what would happen to them from the humans and probably by her if they came out before she came back. Having been on the receiving end of the females emphatic instructions before they were much more worried about her than the humans who would bang on the outside of the trunk in an attempt to get the youngsters to come out.

It wasn’t long and she was back and after indicating to the visitors not to approach too closely she began airlifting the pups out of the trunk by grabbing them by the loose skin around their necks and carrying them off across the meadow to their new home. She managed to get two of the pups relocated and as she was returning for the last one it  could not resist one more look at everyone who had caused their eviction. In a few moments the entire family was gone and the meadow was quiet again.

Later in doing some research on this post an interesting discovery was made. Wanting to know more about marmots in general the Marmot-A-Rama page was accessed and it was found that Marmots are Italian. If you look closely at the chart below you will see that their Taxonomy clearly shows their origin and that each phyla entry is written in Italian. You can see this more clearly if you sound out the entries phonetically. Such as Chordata, pronounced ‘Chorrr dah’ taaa” or ‘mah may’ leeah’. Another way to prove this is to look carefully around the den entrance for old pieces of pasta or broken opera records. Anything with Pavarotti or the Three Tenors will prove this beyond any doubt.

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum:   Chordata

Class:      Mammalia

Order:      Rodentia

Family:     Sciuridae

Subfamily: Xerinae

Tribe:         Marmotini

Genus:       Marmota

Yeah I know, weird right? But that’s Nature for you. In case you were wondering, the person who took this shot of the young Marmot pup was not one of the bad tourists who got too close to their home. We know better, we’re professionals here. This picture was taken with a powerful, long, telephoto lens from well over a hundred yards away. We know how to do this. Just thought you should know.

Sunset On The Snake

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As we edge on into Fall the rut is starting to gain momentum. All of the large ungulates are undergoing the changes that are needed to compete in the test of supremacy about to start. The elk have already begun their contests and the Mulies are about 7-8 weeks away from early November when they start. Moose are about a month away from their main rut but like everything else in life there are exceptions.

This scene along the Snake river shows a cow moose who is already interested but the bull, which has his back turned to her, is not quite into the season yet. He would probably be a little more so if another bull showed up, but for now he’s saving his energy. The location of this shot is just a short ways down from the Oxbow and its late afternoon in mid-September as the sun goes down.

Up in this part of the country, Grand Teton National Park in Northwestern Wyoming, the colors are in full display. It’s down jacket weather and time has slowed down somewhat. Soon the air will be filled with the bugling of the Elk and the bark or bugle of the Moose as Nature puts on one of her incredible displays of life in the Animal Kingdom.

9-11

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I heard some humans talking as they walked along the trail down by the river about something called 9-11. Apparently this was something terrible for them as they seemed upset and were very emotional about it. As near as I can figure out some humans from outside their territory came in and did something that killed a huge number of them at their favorite gathering place. This wasn’t done over collecting females or defending their territory it was for some strange reason called terrorism and religion. This is the hard part to understand. We don’t have anything called terrorism or religion, what is it? Why would those things make them want to kill the entire herd? Humans have always been strange, but to kill a whole herd for something I don’t understand is strange even for humans. I hope we don’t have a 9-11.

Shuffles Lipinski

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A conversation with Shuffles. Last weekend while on an ill-fated whirlwind trip to Yellowstone National Park to photograph some Peregrine Falcon chicks that were due to hatch and be photogenic, the visit sadly ended in frustration due to an unknown event that resulted in the parents abandoning the nest and the eggs within. We haven’t discovered what the event was yet but it resulted in one lone egg being left exposed in the nest. Since this changed our plans we decided to look up an old friend. We had a few moments to talk with Shuffles Lipinski a local resident of Grand Teton National Park.

If you enter Yellowstone from the south you have  to go through Grand Teton National Park to get there. Sometimes the Grand Tetons seems like the cross-eyed step child of Yellowstone, as it feels kind of like a door mat as tourists rush through to get to its older sister up north. It’s not though. They have plenty to offer in the way of scenery, such as big mountains that resemble a woman’s bosoms, and wildlife galore. There are Moose and Mulies, Elk and Canada Geese, Pelicans and bears. Plenty of bears. Like our friend pictured above. This is Shuffles Lipinski, a cinnamon colored black bear that can be seen on any given day hanging around where tourists can see him. Even though we were in a terrible hurry at the time to get up into Yellowstone to check the Peregrine nest we took a few moments to have a conversation with Shuffles. Here is an excerpt from that interview.

So Shuffles, Whatcha doing?

Just a runnin’ and a grinnin’.

What for?

I need to get up there where that tour bus is unloading them tourists.

We didn’t think you liked tourists.

I don’t. Hate ’em actually. But if I get up there and run around some and grin at them I’ll get points.

What do you mean you’ll get points?

Points. You get enough points and you get transferred up North. Get to play in the big show. Make a name for yourself. Get chicks. Free drinks at the club. Maybe a piece of the T-shirt business.

Really. Do all the bears want to do this ? Maybe that’s why we never see as many bears down here as we do up in Yellowstone.

Yup. You also get a number up there. Down here they still call you by your name. Up there if you’re cool you get a number. I want a number.

Note to readers: Yellowstone National Park is very proud, perhaps overly so, that they depersonalize their animals by giving them a number instead of a name, like Peaches, or “Kor, god of the fang”. That way they think people will get less attached to them, and not care when they get killed or worse, have to wear those tracking collars all the time. For instance if you ask a ranger or one of the bear guards they assign to each bear something like “Hey where’s Rosie? I haven’t seen her and the cubs lately.” they will give you a disgusted look and sternly but condescendingly, tell you “We don’t name our animals here in Yellowstone National Park, bear # 509 will be out shortly. You can wait over there behind that white line.” (‘you dumbass visitor’, being understood. We’re watching you now. Don’t make me talk to you again.) Returning to the interview.

So what’s wrong with your name? We like Shuffles, makes you more human and lovable, approachable even.

Yeah right. You approach me, I bite you. I get sent to the big house and get a tag stuck in my ear and then one in my other ear when I bite you again, and then its lights out bwana on the third time. You get the big sleep. No, I want the number. You get a number like 812 or something and people don’t know what to expect. You could be dangerous, you could be a stone cold killer just waiting for some bus rider to get close enough to take a selfie, people don’t know. You have a name like Horace or Shuffles, you don’t get the respect. Gotta have the respect, that ‘s what brings in the big bucks from people wanting to see the ‘bad’ bear. That’s what ups the T-shirt revenue, know what I mean?

Ok, got it. Listen we got to run. Got Peregrines and their chicks to shoot. Been a slice. Catch you later Shuffles.

Cool dude, listen, do me one, when you get up North tell the bear guys I growled at you and looked threatening. I gotta get out of here. I’m dying down here. Don’t tell ’em I bit anybody or anything just that I looked bad. Ok? Later brother. I owe you one.

Tall Grass

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TallGrass0293Bull moose Grand Teton National Park

Ever since the cutbacks and budgetary restraints lifted their ugly heads our national parks have begun falling into serious rack and ruin. They’ve cut back on rangers, cooks, bottle washers, ticket takers, guys who paint those yellow lines on the road, guys who stand there with those stop signs on poles so you don’t drive into a hole and break your rear axle and it costs you eleven hundred dollars to get it fixed, plus it made my dog throw up in the back seat and we had to have that smell in the car for the rest of the week, but that’s a selfish pet peeve of mine and not really germane to this topic, but back to the point, most importantly grounds keepers. Grounds keepers are the backbone of the unseen forces that keep out national parks at their very spiffiest. Without them, well, you have rack and ruin.

Here’s a perfect example. In the good old days when the national park service kept the bonfires burning with hundred-dollar bills you would have had groundskeepers out in droves, cutting the grass to it mandated length of 8mm in all of the forests and meadows, pulling up unsightly weeds and flowers that weren’t the correct hue, and generally keeping everything pristine. Now what do you have? Chaos that’s what.

There is grass growing wherever it darn well wants to, flinging itself skyward with an abandonment we haven’t seen since before we had National parks. Unkempt, these grasses and weeds are showing a total disregard for the viewing public, just ignoring the fact that as tourists we might like to see those animals we came here to see without the distractions of a natural environment in the way.

Look at the image above. Someone has taken a perfectly good moose and seemingly just flung it into the tall grass to fend for itself. Confused, probably dismayed, what does it do, it lays down. How are we as intruding taxpaying citizens, not to mention tourists, going to see what his knees look like in all that grass let alone his whole darn self. Why isn’t he standing up looking noble like we see him on all those post cards in the souvenir shops. You can’t even see his knees now due to all that natural grass growing willy-nilly all over the place. We have a right to see moose knees if we want to look at them. But can we? I think the image speaks for itself.

We need to get these politicians off their collective butts and out in the forests with some weed-whackers, that’s what I think. Lets get things back under control people. Lets get some money flowing again. Lets get those groundskeepers back to work. This is a shameful state of affairs and I for one am sick of it. Lets get that moose back on his feet so he can stand tall and proud once again.  And we can see its knees if we want to. It’s the American way.

Friday Morning Reflections

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Schwabacher Landing3294Schwabachers Landing Grand Teton National Park

As you travel along the Snake river in the Grand Teton National Park you will arrive at a famous scenic spot called Schwabacher’s landing. It is a beautiful place as you can see. The spot is famous for several reasons, one of the most intriguing being there is almost no history regarding who this Schwabacher was, what he was doing there and why the ‘landing’ was named after him.

Well, we can fix that. I have from several unimpeachable sources at least one, if not more, accurate although completely unsubstantiated stories, regarding this Mr. Schwabacher. He wasn’t the sterling character you’ve come to know and love from seeing his ‘landing’ on countless calendars and post cards and coffee mugs etc., nope he was a man of dubious but questionable qualities. He was a heavy drinker, he smoked cigars in the presence of ladies, he would spit in the river whenever he felt like it whether he was upstream from camp or not, he used rude language, he was unkind to animals and small children, and he didn’t attend church unless there was that service where they give wine to the faithful and then he left right after the wine was served. Now days he would probably be a politician.

His personal hygiene would become the topic of conversation whenever he was near other people or even in the same county as other people, and the general consensus was that he didn’t have any. Personal hygiene that is, and when you put him on a small boat with several other less than fastidious people, the fact that it would be mentioned at all must have indicated that an incredible aroma wafted off this gentleman that we cannot delve into here it being close to lunch time. It must have been epic if even these hardy souls who lived off the land and ate things we couldn’t look at let alone consume and whose olfactory senses must have been stifled by their own unsavory living conditions to the point that they could tolerate odors that would gag a normal man’s hiney, felt moved to complain. Mr. Schwabacher’s odoriferous presence must have had a prodigious effect. So much so that they beached, or in mariner parlance, landed, their boat and unceremoniously threw him onto the shore to save themselves, being sorely afraid that they would otherwise all be overcome and die. Hence the name Schwabacher’s Landing.

I tend to believe this story, having visited Schwabacher’s Landing myself and I personally noticed several areas on the bank where the very stones were burned black in the shape of a man lying on the ground and there are trees next to the water that haven’t grown their leaves back yet and this is like ninety years later. History does not relate what Mr. Schwabacher’s fate was. It was rumored that he could walk anywhere in this country in perfect safety because even the grizzlies wouldn’t eat him and grizzlies will eat anything. This may not be the story the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce wanted to hear, but you can’t pick and choose history. If that’s the way it is, well then that’s the way it is. Sorry.

Fortunately Nature has her way of recovering from these types of events and she has admirably in the case of Schwabacher’s Landing, it being gorgeous and hardly oderific at all. If you get a chance, visit it, and if you feel the need you can hang one of those little tree shaped things that make the air smell nice on the bushes just in case.

Velevet On Velvet Off

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Well it’s that time of year again. The trees are just showing the first inclination to put on their party colors and then denude themselves, the air is taking on that brisk tang in the morning that startles you into realizing fall is coming and change is in the cold morning wind. The guys are still staying together in the small groups they formed when the antlers fell in the middle of the winter, but they are beginning to eye each other warily now, friends are becoming deadly competitors, all truces are off and its time to get serious, boyos.

All summer long they’ve been growing their antlers, always being careful not to damage them, and now they itch and they’re turning hard and this damn velvet has to come off and right now. That best friend he’s been hanging with could very well be his next deadly adversary because these boys don’t fight for fun. The points on those antlers are sharp for a reason and they’re eager to put them to use. The stakes are pretty high in their world and its no holds barred when it comes down to who is going to come out of this in one piece.

This is the critical moment in their yearly cycle, its velvet on, velvet off and the bell is about to ring. There is no best man wins in this scenario, its more a matter of survival and that makes it serious in a way that these guys know only too well. Right now the blood has to dry and then the antlers need to be polished. Then its good luck to the one left standing.