We are nearly through with our semi-annual inspection of Yellowstone National Park having checked off almost all of our items on the list except for the few involving working with wolves.
Wolves. What can I say about wolves except that they’re the prima donnas of Yellowstone. They’re good looking, they’re cool, they’re head turners wherever they go and they know it. They’re the rock stars of the park and pretty much do what ever they want to. But that also makes them super-hemerriodial to work with.
They know that they play a large part in this inspection report and usually are falling all over themselves trying to stick their muzzles in everything. They’re the original photo bombers, nonchalantly walking into picture after picture, stealing the thunder of who ever else is being photographed, but not this year.
Apparently they are cheesed off because I outed their watcher they had set up to observe us and blabber it all over the park that we were coming to do our inspection again, see http://www.bigshotsnow.com/the-words-out/, and had made themselves unavailable the entire trip, showing themselves to the occasional tourist but never to us. It looked like it was going to be the first time in many years that we were not going to be able to include the wolves in our report.
Through the use of an intermediary we were able to convince the Lamar pack to assist us, grudgingly of course, with the last item on our report listed as “Resolvability: Can You See the S.O.B.’s Or Not : YES or No”. Resolvability as you know, is defined as “the quality or state of being resolvable”, like that helps right, by one of the better known dictionaries who asked to remain anonymous after hearing that they would be quoted in our report, but whose initials we can disclose are Merriam Webster. To clarify matters a little more clearly, we turned to our own patented, copyrighted, unprinted dictionary “Words You Don’t Hear Much and Understand Less” (The Institute press : ISBN: 55555555551: Author: The Director : © 2015 about 15 mins ago).
Our definition of Resolvability is “to clarify; to make clearer; to see way, way out there; to get fuzzy looking stuff to look right; : Photographic context: to get pixels that are blurry and all over wonky to line up right and get really clear so you can make out what it is you’re trying to see; to not be fuzzy; to not be unrecognizable because it’s all fuzzed up and you can’t tell what it is; to get little hard-to-see details not so hard to see; and so on”. We’ll use our own definition for this report as it makes more sense than the ones those professional dictionary types provide.
So to test the resolvability of seeing wolves we asked them to come in closer so we could at least see them with our naked eyes, but being wolves and the Lamar pack at that, the biggest divas of the bunch, the most we could do was get them to come in to about 3/4 of a mile from our viewing station. They did deign to howl for us however. Being so far out there meant that they were just tiny itsy little black dots barely resolvable with the naked eye and only if you knew exactly where to look for them. The dots didn’t even look wolf-like. You couldn’t see ears or eyes or as they say in Wisconsin, nothin’. You couldn’t see nothin’. So the wolves get a big fat FAIL on this test. We’ll see how they like it when management reads this report and sees how they acted. I hope they get transferred down to Old Faithful where they’ll be on display all day long with screaming kids and flash cameras going off in their face all day . We’ll see how they like being divas then.
We did have one ace up our sleeve though. We had this great big long lens that has plenty of resolvability built into it and we were able to get some pictures of them. Not really clear ones with every pixel lined up perfectly but resolvable for being shot at 3/4 of a mile away in the rain and nearly dark out. This is a huge crop from the area where the wolf was sitting. If the scene were viewed with your eye the wolf wouldn’t have been visible, just a dark unwolf-like dot. So I guess if we got any pictures at all where you can tell they’re wolves than there was a certain amount of resolvability and we may have to revise our report to a Yes.
Note : To those of you tuning in late the following posts will catch you up on preceding events. There is no extra charge for this service, it is included in the cost of admission. We know you don’t want to miss a minute of our fascinating but undocumented report.
http://www.bigshotsnow.com/the-words-out/
http://www.bigshotsnow.com/announcement-13/
http://www.bigshotsnow.com/yellowstone-passes-inspection/
http://www.bigshotsnow.com/ghosts-in-the-darkness/
http://www.bigshotsnow.com/you-dont-see-that-every-day/
http://www.bigshotsnow.com/now-are-the-foxes/
http://www.bigshotsnow.com/into-each-park-some-rain-must-fall/
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