Ungulates-Moose, deer, Elk (20141130) A snowy Sunday run with Kerri

After a fantastic day with Jamie on Saturday, Kerri and I decided we would take a peek out the 1A to see if we could find some carnivores. We anticipated that the plows would have the roadways clear so shoveling shouldn't be necessary:)
Our first encounter was with this mature bull elk.

Our next critter on 1A was this nice Whitetail buck. There was a rental motor home stopped and three guys from France were already capturing images.

Don't let the smaller antlers on this buck fool you. This is quite a large mature buck. It just takes a look at the relative size of his ears  and the blunt shape of his face to tell you that this is a large mature buck.

The smaller antlers on this buck are primarily due to two fundamentals; genetics and quality of feed. Pine needles serve much less nutrition than the grains that his country cousins have access to.

Unfortunately this was the extent of the wildlife available to us on this day on 1A. So we headed over to Canmore for a secondary run hoping to add to our opportunities. Passing through Banff we thought with the nice sun present we should be stop and grab a couple of images of "the airport herd".

I thought that this "family" made an interesting shot. I particularly like the young calf in the lower left. Here is another image that shows how worried the little critter is with our presence.

Our secondary run was not providing many more targetrs than our primary. I was surprised at the total lack of birds; large and small.  We did manage to find this beautiful cow moose feeding in one of the parking areas.

It always amazes me that these large ungulates seem to prefer the shade, you would think that they would be sun worshippers at this time of year. Now that we are higher in the mountains you can see that the snow depth is quite a bit deeper than it is down on the flats.

One of the great things about here in Alberta, and the mountains in particular, when the game is scarce we still have beautiful vistas!  We spotted the moon in the sky and looked for an opportunity to capture it in the blue sky.

I don't do many landscapes so I thought I would try a moonscape :)  there is no question that we had great  light today. I will use the brisk winds that we were experiencing as the main reason that we didn't see much.

I hope that you had the chance to put some wild in your life on the weekend.
Turbo