April in Yellowstone has a unique energy.  The weather is unpredictable, with one day so balmy it might as well be July and the next so frigid it feels like January.  Some days combine all four seasons – warm sunlight followed by cold rain and freezing wind that swirls into a blizzard before the sky suddenly clears again.  You can feel spring struggling to arrive, in fits and starts, with frequent backsliding.

Wildlife, on the other hand, generally follows a somewhat predictable pattern.  Animals we haven’t seen all winter begin appearing, first a trickle and then a flood.  Male grizzlies are usually already out in March, and then at some point after that we start to see mountain bluebirds, sandhill cranes, black bears, pronghorns, red dogs (newborn bison), robins, ospreys, marmots, ground squirrels, and deer, among others.  But the specific timelines vary from one year to the next, and on any given day you never know what you might see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I started most of my April mornings with the short walk from Tower Junction up to Calcite Springs.  That stretch of road is closed to cars until early May, making it a nice wide hiking trail that I almost always had entirely to myself.  For the first few weeks I mostly saw bison, deer, marmots, ravens, sandhill cranes, robins, bighorn sheep, grouse, northern flickers, a muskrat couple at Rainy Lake, and a Peregrine falcon couple perched on the cliffs above the Yellowstone River.  One morning I spotted the Peregrine couple mating, something I’d never seen before.

 

 

The area around Calcite is popular with black bears, but it wasn’t until the second half of April that I finally saw my first – a young adult boar.  And then few days later I came across two different black bears that were clearly together and might have been siblings, one with a black coat and the other cinnamon.  I saw those three bears regularly after that, but no others, which was surprising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding only three black bears, no cubs, and no mustelids on my April Calcite walks this year was disappointing, as were the photos I managed to get.  But I still loved it, maybe even more than I have in previous years.  There’s something deeply gratifying about really getting to know a specific place over time, and the more familiar I get with that part of the park the more I enjoy it.