“Well, I’ve never seen that before.”

It’s something I still find myself saying almost every time I visit Yellowstone, even after living next door for years.  On this particular morning I’d driven into the park before sunrise, as usual, and just south of Trout Lake I noticed an unfamiliar brown shape on a hillside.  The profile didn’t quite match a bison or moose, and it seemed a little too big to be a bear.  I stopped at a pullout for a closer look through my binoculars.  Ah, two grizzly bears…  Wait, why are they huddled together like that?  Oh!

 

 

A few days earlier, Marie and I had woken up to find a moose mom with two newborn calves in our yard – something else I’d never seen before.  Years ago we watched a moose calf in our neighbor’s yard, but this was our first time seeing newborn twins from the comfort of our own living room.

 

 

The next day we spotted the moose twins again a little way down the road.

 

 

In early June I started hiking up to Trout Lake almost every morning.  I wanted to find out if the cutthroat trout would spawn in the inlet creek this year (after they seemed to skip it in 2024), and I hoped otters might show up at some point (after I didn’t see them at Trout Lake at all in 2024).

Apparently the trout finally decided to get their act together.  They began massing at the mouth of the inlet creek on June 11th, and by June 13th many of them were darting up the creek.  I thought the spawn would only last a few days, but it continued for more than two weeks.  Why was there no spawn last year and such a long one this year?  I couldn’t figure it out.

I heard a reliable report that someone saw two otters at Trout Lake in late June, but I never spotted a single otter up there throughout the entire month.  Other predators, however, took full advantage of the easy meals.  An osprey couple built a nest in a dead tree near the lake, and I often saw one of them eating a freshly-caught trout for breakfast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In mid-June we had a really nice visit from Jeff and Carol Lynne, the parents of my friend Rob E.  Jeff had been to our house last year with Rob and Rob’s brother Todd, and this year he and Carol Lynne were kind enough to stop by for a couple of nights as they drove from Todd’s place in the Pacific Northwest back to their home in Kansas City.  We spent their one full day looking for wildlife in the morning and then hiking up to Trout Lake in the afternoon.  It was great to see Jeff again and spend some time with Carol Lynne.

 

 

 

Throughout June I searched for the fox family I watched earlier in the year, but they were too well hidden for my limited detective skills.  And then near the end of the month the family suddenly appeared back at their old log pile again.  I first saw them one morning before sunrise when I had to slam on my brakes because the mom was standing in the middle of the road with a kit.  Later the mom delivered food to the kits by dropping some rodents right between the yellow highway lines, which brought the kits sprinting onto the road (and may or may not have caused me to rush onto the pavement waving my arms like a crazy person to stop traffic).  I couldn’t help but question some of her parenting choices.

 

 

 

 

There seemed to be only four kits now, down from seven, and they’d grown so much that I couldn’t figure out which ones had survived.  While it felt amazing to see the family again, a big part of me wished they’d just stayed at their last location instead of risking another stint by the road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At one point the fox mom vanished into the treeline for a few minutes and returned with something in her mouth that turned out to be two baby birds.  She delivered the birds to her kits and then headed back to the treeline.  Curious, I followed, only to see her approach an evergreen tree and begin climbing it as nimbly as a cat.  Soon she was peeking through the branches 20 feet above the ground, apparently checking to see if she’d missed any other defenseless chicks.

 

 

 

Red foxes can climb trees?  “Well, I’ve never seen that before,” I said to myself.