Buffalo, Bears (20140925) Day one in Waterton part one

With Zel coming over from Vancouver on Wednesday night, Jamie showed up at 5:15 a.m. to start the trip to Waterton for three days of bear hunting. We usually find something to shoot on the way down, but this year was a little thin. On the bright side we had a GREAT time in the Bison paddock.

Of course after a bit of fresh water in the morning for a bison is like brushing your teeth. So of course the next was a bit of a bath.

Here is a closer image of this enormous land animals (largest in North America), the mind boggles at the world that the first Europeans found with millions of these animals occupying the plains.

We had some terrific views of these massive animals with this terrific light, so I thought I would throw in an image of one of the youngsters.

We arrived at our destination and got right to work. We had great light and early on it looked like the critters were going to be cooperative. We were only at work a short while when we found this beauty. check out the size of the "caboose" this bear is in great shape for the upcoming winter:)

We next ran into a couple of Stellar's Jays. While we were able to get a couple of shots, we took much better images later in the day, so I will post some in a bit. We had a long distance bear that we spotted next. Then we found this Juniper bear. This guy was laying in the shade on this Juniper bush and we almost drove right by, he was really quite difficult to see. This was our closest encounter of the entire trip.

This next unit provided us with about 10 minutes of viewing before we moved on. It looks like it was feeding on "partridge" berries.

We next stopped at the end of the road and took a look around and had a bathroom break. Unfortunately I didn't take my camera and missed an opportunity for a "summer" American Dipper shot. When I did return looking for the bird I did spot this bear taking advantage of the man-made structure to get across the river.

 Just a few minutes later we spied a family of five come across the bridge from the opposite side, I expect that they never saw the bear during their walk:)  This wrapped up our morning run. While we had spotted quite a few bears the lack of berries had me very concerned that we wouldn't be getting the "up close" encounters that we have enjoyed at this location in past trips. Stay tuned for part 2.

Turbo