“How was the park this morning?” my mom asked a while back.

“Eh, things have been pretty quiet lately,” I complained.  “All I saw was the usual bison, some elk, a couple coyotes, a bald eagle, and a moose.”

“Oh, is that all?” she scoffed.  “You might be a little spoiled.”

It was a fair point.  I still love seeing all of Yellowstone’s wildlife, and I’m immensely grateful that I get to spend so much time in the park.  I’ll never take any of it for granted.  But these days I do need a little something extra to get a real jolt of adrenaline, the kind of thrill that lingers.

Under the right circumstances, that thrill can still come from animals I see regularly.  It helps if there’s something unusual going on, maybe a seldom-seen behavior, an especially photogenic background, or really good light.  And it definitely does not help if there are a bunch of other people around.  More and more I find myself avoiding crowds, even if it means missing a good sighting.

But there’s still so much Yellowstone wildlife that I’m thrilled to see in any situation.  At the moment, owls and mustelids (otters, weasels, badgers, pine martens, etc.) are very high on that list.  I hoped I’d start finding more of them when colder weather arrived, but in November they were frustratingly scarce.  I made it through the entire month without spotting any.

In early December, thankfully, my luck improved.  Just before sunrise one morning near the Confluence area (where Soda Butte Creek meets the Lamar River), I came across a couple cars parked on the road, with a handful of photographers pointing their cameras down towards the river.  Otters!  For me this was huge.  Otter sightings in Lamar Valley used to happen pretty often in the winter, but over the past couple of years they’ve been surprisingly rare.

I drove to the nearest pullout, parked, and walked back towards the other photographers, who’d already returned to their cars and started to drive away.  One of them stopped and rolled down his window.  “Have you seen any wolves?” he asked me.

“Wolves?” I repeated, jarred by the disconnect in our priorities.  “No, no wolves.  What happened to the otters?”

“They just vanished,” he replied before racing off.

Vanished, huh?  To be fair, I couldn’t see the otters anywhere.  Maybe they returned to a nearby burrow for a nap.  But not waiting a while to see if they might still be around seemed crazy to me.  I walked up a little farther, staying close to the partially-frozen river as it bent away from the road, and kept my eyes on the areas of open water.  Soon three dark heads popped up.

 

 

Now I had the otters all to myself in a location that was very difficult to see from the road.  The temperature was just above freezing, which is unseasonably warm for a December morning in Yellowstone, and a patchy layer of clouds provided a nice range of mellow light.  What more could I ask?

 

 

 

The otters – possibly a mom with two mostly-grown kids – didn’t seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere, and apparently they weren’t in the mood to catch fish.  For a while they just hung out by a small hole in the ice and groomed each other.  Eventually the mom and one of the kids swam under the ice to a large area of open water downriver, but the other kid, for whatever reason, refused to join them and instead started making the loud chirping sound that I’m beginning to recognize as a “Where’d everyone go?” vocalization.  The two that left eventually returned (racing over the ice instead of under it this time), but quickly took off again.

 

 

 

 

The leave-and-return cycle repeated itself for two hours.  I loved every second.  Sometimes the left-behind otter would slip into the water and pop up nearby to take a closer look at me.

 

 

 

One of the many reasons I love watching otters is that they almost always seem to be having fun.  I’ve probably said this before, but it’s possible that the best decision in the entire history of the English language was to call a group of otters a “romp.”

 

 

 

 

I texted a friend of mine who was in the park that morning to let him know about the otters, and he arrived in time to catch the show.  Unfortunately, a professional guide who knew my friend saw him walking on the road, figured out what he was doing, and followed with a small group of clients.  That alone wouldn’t have been big deal, but the guide also radioed the sighting to his colleagues.  Very quickly another guide showed up with a big group of boisterous clients.  I took that as my cue to wrap up what had been one of my favorite winter otter encounters in years.  I can’t think of many ways I’d rather spend a morning.

 

 

The afterglow of the otter time was strong enough to power me through the next several weeks of relatively slow sightings.  A gang of bull moose (maybe as many as nine?) hung out at Round Prairie for a big chunk of the month, which I enjoyed.  One morning I was treated to a relatively close fly-by from a bald eagle that had been perched on a riverbank.  And a moose mom with two yearling calves spent a morning grazing in our yard in Silver Gate.  But on most days in December I didn’t take a single photo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My January sightings were similarly low-key, with the notable exception of a few more otter encounters.  I looked for otters every morning, and in early January the family of three appeared again basically right where I’d seen them a month before.  This time, however, they spent some time fishing and managed to haul in a good-sized trout.  I had them to myself for most of the morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple weeks later I found the otter family twice in the same day.  In the morning I watched them catch fish and frolic on the frozen bank of the Lamar River.

 

 

 

And then in the afternoon I found the family grooming each other on the icy riverbank.  At one point I heard a sharp cracking noise and turned to see a coyote making its way towards the otters.  Aware of the coyote but totally unflustered, the otters didn’t even bother to slip back into the safety of the water until the coyote burst into a sprint to close the final distance.

 

 

 

 

It was the first otter-coyote interaction I’d ever seen in person – a genuine thrill, even for someone who might be a little spoiled.