Field Notes

Chilly weather

gbumann — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:57:04 +0000

Skies this morning are overcast and heavy with rain. It’s been unseasonably cool, following a very warm spell the end of August. While I was down at the grizzly bear discovery Center in West Yellowstone on Monday, I found myself hiding under the umbrella and zipping up my raincoat on more than one occasion as I watched the bears. As one radio announcer put it “we are having cold and rainy weather of October-just at the end of August”. So now that I’ve dropped the boy off at daycare and then hide in the studio, maybe even start a fire in the wood stove, and get some quality work done on this bear sculpture.

: This is a 3 foot version of the seated grizzly bear sculpture that I did a couple of years… I’m really excited about being able to have a second shot at this piece and to make some definite improvements.

The bears are back in town

gbumann — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:24:09 +0000

Today on our morning walk we spotted the very first bear tracks on our usual loop. I found one single, front, grizzly track from a small bear in the drying mud of a puddle. The apple trees around the Blanding Station have begun to bear fruit, and considering the white bark pine crop is poor this year, the bears are coming into town early. The one squat apple tree in the front yard of this old forest service homestead was ripped limb from limb with a couple big piles of bear scat beneath it. I guess we’ll have to start carrying our bear spray our morning walks now looking both ways before stepping off the deck in the predawn light. Jenny also told me that the shed of the house just outside of Gardner was broken into by a bear and that the cat food inside was completely consumed… and it’s just the end of August… stay tuned for more bear reports.

Wolves in Hayden Valley

gbumann — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 03:57:57 +0000

Today had me leading a wildlife watching program in the Park for three lovely ladies. They had an interest in seeing wolves and so our destination was directed towards Hayden Valley. Wolf viewing in the lower valleys is difficult at this time of year as their prey - principly elk- have headed to the high country. A great start to the trip took the form of a long-tailed weasel darting across the road as we exited the driveway of the Yellowstone Association Overlook campus. From there we headed to Tower, up over Dunraven Pass and then over to Canyon and Hayden Valley. The skies were cloudless and clear blue and the bison carcass that we had been seeing so much activity around over the weekend had been rendered to a pile of bones and hopeful ravens. We checked the rendezvous site of the Canyon wolf pack and caught a quick glimpse of the alpha female before she bedded down out of view. At that point our attention turned to a moving pile of dirt just a few yards away… it was a pocket gopher excavating a tunnel and pushing the excavated soil out of the burrow. They have such cute pudgey cheeks and endearing, little bead eyes.

Our luck in the wolf department changed as word came that the adult males of the pack, two of them, had been spotted back to the north and west of the road near Alum Creek. With a little bit of checking, scanning and scoping, we spotted the males (ther are 3 adult wolves in Canyon wolf pack - the white alpha female, the black alpha male 712M and the gray beta male, and three pups - two gray and one black). The males came from the north and moved south to the road - the gray one harassing a lone bull bison along the way, before crossing the road a hundred yards to our south. By this point the ‘poparazzi’ had arrived and nearly cut off their crossing of the road. Luckily these individuals have become quite used to the human wall of cars and trotted right through before making their way to the east to the rendezvous to rejoin the female and deliver their belly of meat to the pups.

Convicts and rabbitbrush

gbumann — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:42:18 +0000

All of a sudden there’s the slightest inkling of autumn. A few well-placed rainstorms and the flowering of the rabbitbrush are telling us that summer is nearly gone. It makes one want to be out doors that much more… apparently so for convicts also. If the popular media hasn’t gotten to you, there were three escaped convicts who broke out of jail and decided to head, to of all places, Yellowstone. This isn’t the first time it’s happened but it was the first time while we were here. We did a good job one evening by scaring the tar out of ourselves before bedtime by discussing the recent updates on trio then proceeding to stew about the plausible outcomes in each of our respective heads until long after we should have been asleep… Including gunfights on the porch and bear spraying breaking-in intruders… As it turns out, two of them were in Gardiner and made a phone call to an acquaintance in another town to see if they could find refuge, whereupon this acquaintance up and called the cops. Those two are still on the lam and possibly in Canada but the other one was picked up south and east of the Park in Wyoming.

Hack & slash sculpture

gbumann — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:45:06 +0000

Sometimes as an artist you get to picking at details far more than you really should… when instead, you should be looking at the bigger picture. And oftentimes it takes an outside force (such as your wife saying, “what were you thinking here?”, the dogs knocking a sculpture onto the floor) to help push you over the edge towards doing what really ought to be done to improve a piece of art. In my most recent case, it required the neighbor stopping over with his grandkids to say “the hair on a buffalo’s heads looks too big…”. And that’s all it took - I whipped out a knife, chopped and hacked at the head, then let Bill go after it with a tool and his hands and before long it started looking a lot better. Bill has spent his entire life in this area and spent much of that time around bison - both alive and dead - I trust his judgement… I’ll likely keep working at it for some time to come, and may overhaul things yet again before hiding it under a sheet for a month or two before taking another ‘go’ at it. Thanks Bill, Brian and Carmen… stop over again when you have some time to spare.

The "new and improved" bison sculpture after our neighbor's sharp eyes were put to use.

Trip to Alta, Utah just outside of Salt Lake City

gbumann — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:45:05 +0000

I had a great weekend visit with some friends in Alta, Utah. The drive down was very pleasant despite lasting eight hours. Due to road construction in Yellowstone, I had to go a different route through the Tetons and Logan, Utah areas. Treats along the way included grizzly bear crossing right in front of the car and amazing morning sunlight on the Grand Teton peaks and surroundings.

This grizzly is crossed right in front of the car as I entered Teton Park.Morning sunlight on Mt. Moran north of Jackson,WY.

Once in Alta at our friends home it was great hospitality, wonderful dining, the peak of the wildflower bloom, stellar vistas along mountain hikes and close-up visits with local moose! Thank you so very much Peter and Alicia! I had a blast…

These are some of the sites from this weekend's trip to Alta, Utah... this moose was even kind enough to sit for a few pencil sketches.

Book review: “Last Stand” - George Grinnell’s fight to save Buffalo

gbumann — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 19:45:19 +0000

Book review of “Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the battle to save the buffalo and the birth of the new West (Michael Punke, 2007, published by University of Nebraska press). This book was sent to me by a student and it is a detailed account of the slaughter of the North American bison as well as George Bird Grinnell’s life story and decades-long mission to save wild places and species. From his earliest days being tutored by Lucy Audubon, John James’ wife, through his college years, early trips out west including Yellowstone Park, to his tenure as Forest and Stream magazine editor and lobbyist on behalf of saving the bison, I learned a great deal about this little-known but incredibly important figure in the history of American conservation -George Bird Grinnell. The fine points of this book were many including coverage of the native relationship with buffalo, how buffalo Bill Cody got his start, the political climate of the times, corruption and power of the railroad lobby, passage of the Lacy Act, etc. A few other parts of the book that I found very insightful were how and why the buffalo robe, leather and bone markets developed and how the hunters so effectively mowed them down. The key to the latter I discovered, was that the most efficient buffalo hunters understood buffalo behavior well enough to identify the dominant cow - they would then shoot, but not kill her immediately - this would confuse the remaining animals and they would just mill around as the hunters killed them one by one. This has got me looking at the buffalo herds in the park much differently these days, in particular, who is that most dominant female in the herd? From the standpoint of needing to protect a herd, she might be a good place to start. It also became clear how close we actually came to having a railroad line directly through Lamar Valley from Mammoth to Cooke City. I would recommend finding a copy of this book - it certainly made me appreciate what we have here in Yellowstone that much more.

Celebrity week in the park

gbumann — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:10:00 +0000

In the realm of national politics you, may know that Joe Biden was in the Park this week. I was leading a class down at Old Faithful when we ran into his entourage. Though I shied away from the plainclothes men with wires in their ears, but a few of the kids from our group did manage to either shake the vice president’s hand or get their photo with him. Less celebrated, but also having had their fair share of the limelight were Phillippe Cousteau, grandson of Jacques Cousteau and Jeff Corwin who were accompanying our group of groups of school children who had won the Siemens “We can change the World” Challenge through the Discovery Channel Education Program. I was with the group for two of their three days in the park- the first of which was down at Old Faithful where we got to see two eruptions of Old Faithful along with interruptions of Beehive and some minor eruption activity of Giantess Geyser… some of the first that I’ve ever seen. Yesterday was our final day and we managed to see the alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack some outstanding bison behavior near Soda Butte cone, striking views from the brink of the upper falls of the Yellowstone River and the expansive vista of the lower falls from Artist Point. AND, the capstone of it all, getting to see a black bear eat at deer carcass near Hellroaring trailhead in the pouring rain!

Dinner on the porch & a thunder shower overhead

gbumann — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:49:58 +0000

It’s the end of a long day and after walking the dogs (I’ve been a bachelor since Jenny left with little George to visit friends and attend a family reunion on the East Coast), I settled down to have a dinner salad and read the initial pages of a book on Thomas Moran that came in the mail today (actually a book of his letters to his wife entitled “Home thoughts from afar: Letters of Thomas Moran to Mary Nimmo Moran”). With the dogs at my feet I settled into the book and a down blanket as clouds built to the west. Soon the sound of distant thunder and the sweet smell of rain-kicked dust enveloped the house porch. With the thunderheads blotting out the remaining sunlight, I put my book down and wrapped the blanket tighter around. The mass of refreshing cool air brought a chilly bite and I recline further to enjoy the orange flicker of lightning as it streaked through the clouds above.

Bathing grizzly and otters in the Park

gbumann — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:49:57 +0000

I had the most enjoyable time in the park today with some folks on a Yellowstone Association program. We met at Roosevelt Lodge then departed for Lamar Valley around 6:30 AM. Wolf viewing was slim to nil so we made a few stops to watch pronghorn antelope bison and a black bear along the south side of the Valley. We soon got a tip from another guide that there had been a grizzly around the confluence of Lamar River and Soda Butte Creek. Though not visible when we arrived, the bear was certainly in the area, so endeavored to wait it out. After climbing up on the bluff overlooking the river we took in the morning scenery-bright sun clear skies and a fair amount of greenery for this time of the year. We saw coyotes sandhill cranes and a light colored grizzly all the way across the Lamar Valley moving along the tree line. And just as soon as we finished watching that bear along Soda Butte Creek popped out of the willows. Its main motivation, it seemed, was to leave its shady bed in the shrubs and take a cooling bath in the creek water. This it did, lounging about and submerging itself up to its shoulders and neck before leaving to graze on some grasses and disappear into the willows again. We took a quick trip up to Baronett peak and spotted a nanny mountain goat in her kid. The mother was fully in her sleek, white summer coat and stood out clearly against the green patch of vegetation where they fed… Once you knew where to look… After lunch we took a quick hike up to a small lake and were greeted with views of six different otters-all frolicking and fishing along the lake shore. They looked like sleek brown porpoises as they follow each other in a line swimming parallel to the shore line-breaking the water surface to breathe, and with arched backs, diving back down, and then up again.