Thursday, October 15, 2009

Elk Antics...


The photograph was taken one evening late while shooting with Buckwheat. This young bull just layed in the meadow chewing his cud apparently uninterested that to his left was seven more bulls and a number of cows. To get this photograph I had to remove the 1.4 teleconverter from the 70-200 2.8 lens, lay flat on the ground and not do much zooming. I just wish my photos looked as good on the web as they do on my own systems.

The video was taken early Wednesday morning in some of the newly reclaimed area from strip mining. I really don't care to shoot in these areas because I do not like the green as it appears in the backgrounds and foregrounds, but sometimes you have no choice when that is where the action is taking place. The video last 18 seconds and as always I am going to ask you again to PLEASE TURN UP YOUR VOLUME. What you will see is two dominant bulls square off and lock antlers as they push each other down the other side of the mountain watch the screen to the upper left first and then to the lower right. The younger satellite bulls (much like some men) will come running in bugling as soon as the big bulls get out of site. These bulls know they do not have a chance with the cows and take advantage of any opportunity they get. They usually do not score as the larger bulls return quickly and run them off. Wow! what a great time it was.

Hey it is Thursday and that means go visit my son Shane's site for a new post.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice, crisp, clear photo. The video is great....awesome bugling.

Willard said...

Those were an exciting few days there toward the end of the week. I talked to Buckwheat yesterday and he said that the activity has pretty much crashed now. I think we could safely say that we got to witness the peak.

I think we got to hear some of the most intense bugling I have heard, or at least it rivaled the best I have heard in the past.