On July 8, I needed to head up to Gardiner, Montana and drove through Yellowstone. I wanted to stop at Norris Geyser Basin to photograph the area in the early light but the fog most of the way up was pretty thick. As I came to the entrance to the geyser basin, the fog thinned out so I decided to go ahead and check things out. I met a family from California and we walked down to Porcelain Basin together and talked about the park. They mentioned they hoped to see Steamboat Geyser erupt. Steamboat is the largest active geyser in the world, reaching heights of almost 400 feet. It’s been in an active face for the past few years but had only erupted once since early May. They started to head off and I started to photograph when the ground started to rumble and a roar broke the stillness of the morning. I looked south and over a quarter mile away, the huge water column of Steamboat could be seen rising over the landscape. I yelled to the family that Steamboat was erupting and we all headed in that direction. The water phase can last for almost an hour so we had plenty of time to enjoy the show. This photo is from the south side of the geyser and the low morning sun illuminates the geyser. Mostly steam is visible and the foreground waterfall is completely made up of water from Steamboat. Most the moisture in the left side of this image is water falling back down from the geyser. I had to walk through that a couple of times and was quite drenched from the experience. It was also important to make sure none of that got on any of my camera equipment as the minerals would damage the glass. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen Steamboat in both water eruption and steam phase but this was the first time I had been there from the beginning and it was an experience I’ll never forget. I’ll share some more images of the largest active geyser in the world in a few more days.

Bison calf, elk calf, and a pronghorn fawn. I’m still hoping to find a moose calf soon but so far no luck. I’ve seen a lot of pronghorn fawns already this year. This one had been hiding in the sagebrush near the road and, probably not wisely, got up to move around. It was quite small so I’d guess it was perhaps a week or so old at most. After stretching it’s legs, it curled back down into the grass. When I passed back by, it was with two other fawns and one doe. Pronghorn does, like many mothers, seem to often babysit other babies.

I was wondering when I might finally see an elk calf this summer. So far all I’ve seen are pronghorn fawns. But last week before the sun had come up all the way, I encountered one of the largest nursery herds I’ve seen with perhaps 100 cows, many of them with a calf in tow. The light was low, so I pushed my ISO up to 4000. I could or should have gone higher in hindsight. But this photo came out nicely.

^{Immature bison and calf. Canon R5, 500mm, beanbag, 1/160 @ f5.6, ISO 1600}

This curious little bison calf was quite social, at least on the day I was watching. It approached this immature bison and, when greeted in a friendly manner, actually liked it’s nose. It made me wonder if possibly they were both from the same cow, just in different years, obviously. The interaction lasted for several minutes before the calf returned to it’s mother who was standing close by.

Much of the West has been under varying degrees of drought for the past several years and Montana is no exception. The southwest part of the state has been the worst but this year drought conditions have become more severe across more of the state. One of the places I spend much of time is extremely dry this year. Above, what is normally a year-round shallow pond is currently baked mud. I typically make it out to this location by late May or early June and, this year, this pond has been dry since before my first visit. Typically right now this pond is full of wading birds and gulls. Another pond across the road still has water but is shrinking fast. A few birds were using it but as of my last visit, most have moved on to better locations.

A fellow photographer, Adam Jones, posted a pretty amazing image of a swallow in flight using the Canon’s new R5 camera. These little birds fly so fast and so erratically that I honestly never thought much about trying to capture them in flight, but after seeing Adam’s photo, I thought I’d give it a try. Adam convinced me to get the R5 back in January and it’s a great camera though some of them have some serious flaws. I’ll get into that later. One of the amazing thing about the camera is it’s ability to track birds in flight fairly well. While my rate of keepers was expectedly low, I was surprised to have any keepers at all. While not as spectacular as Adam’s image, I was excited to capture this interaction. In honesty, the first image is pretty sharp and well focused. The subsequent two images lose focus enough that I can still use them here but probably not for much else.

The second image, above, is still focused enough that I could probably print it nicely but I wish the third image was a little sharper. With the fourth frame, since I was tracking their flight and this interaction brought them to a near stop, I have the birds half out of the frame. All the same, I was pretty impressed that I was able to capture any flight shots of these fast erratic flyers and the large files of the R5 give me room to crop and still have a large enough file for printing. As good as the R5 has been, there has been some production issues. The most notable is that the camera locks up for no apparent reason and the only way to get it working again is to pull the battery. In 6 months of shooting, mine has done it three times but a friend had to send hers back to Canon. They replaced the motherboard in her camera but it didn’t solve the problem. Hopefully Canon will figure this one out quickly.

The above image is cropped in quite a bit because I wanted to show how the water from the rapids was beading up on this harlequin duck’s feathers. I thought it was pretty cool. The uncropped image is below. I spent a lot of time photographing the harlequins in Yellowstone last month and I’m quite happy with the results. In my opinion, harlequin drakes are among the most beautifully colored ducks, along with Mandarin and wood ducks.

^{Harlequin Duck Drake. Canon R5, 500mm +1.4TC, tripod, 1/1600 @ f8, ISO 1600 (full frame)}

Last month, I spent a fair bit of time photographing bison, particularly calves. When I saw this calf at first, it couldn’t have been more than a few hours old. It was barely able to stand and was very wobbly on it’s legs. But it didn’t take long before it was walking around and keeping up with it’s mom. This image was taken at first light as the calf tested out it’s legs. A few hours later, one would have no idea this little guy was wobbly as he was moving around like a champ.

Yellowstone National Park just released that vehicle entries into the park were 50% higher over Memorial Day weekend 2021 than the same time period in 2019. That means there are a lot of people visiting Yellowstone right now. A few weeks ago I had written about having patience if and when you encounter a bison jam. But if you’re visiting now, you will need to expect traffic tie-ups throughout the park and heavy congestion at popular parking areas such as the geyser basins. Visitation outside the parks is also high. Montana State Parks reported back in March that most of their reserved campsites were booked for the summer. But there are places to go to get away from the crowds. The photo above depicts a popular recreational area that is within the Greater Yellowstone area. I won’t post the location here but if you’re interested in finding it, a little research will divulge it’s location.

I went out a few days ago to look for elk calves. It’s June and that means babies of all kinds are out and about now. But the elk must have had their calves hidden in tall grass or sagebrush as, while I found plenty of elk, I didn’t see any calves. I chose to head down a dirt road to see if I’d have any luck. Driving along pretty slowly, I scanned the area for wildlife. As I rolled along, I saw a shape in the grass that looked different. As I slowly moved closer I noticed it was a pronghorn fawn hiding in the grass alongside the road. I didn’t get out as I didn’t want to startle it and instead used my car as a blind and spent a few minutes photographing. If you find a fawn of any kind like this, please don’t try to move it. This is how they camouflage to hide from predators. The mother is somewhere close by and will return to nurse. It is not abandoned and treating it as such places unnecessary stress on it and can lead to it’s death.