Bison | Surviving Winter in Yellowstone National Park
Unlike the summer months when the national parks are teaming with visitors, winter brings far fewer visitors. In fact, in Yellowstone NP, the public is required to enter the park only with a licensed guide from December 15 through March 15. It’s easy to see why with the amount of snowfall that the park gets. For us, traveling in the park in winter requires specialized vehicles - snow coaches. For the animals it’s all about surviving winter in Yellowstone National Park.
The animals there are focussed on surviving winter with foraging for plants buried under the snow or prey doing their best to stay out of sight. But, the search for food is an ongoing process regardless of the animal or the weather. It just seems to me that winter has greater challenges than at other times of the year.
Bison use their enormous heads by swinging them back and forth to brush away the snow that covers their path. This allows them to move forward and also uncover edible grass and plants. It’s a continuous effort until it’s time to move to another area or to process what they’ve already eaten. It’s especially important that they stay nourished since the females are all pregnant and will give birth in the spring.
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
Bison Surviving Winter
The short video below shows the beauty and harshness of winter in Yellowstone National Park.
I feel it is important to note that the vehicle you see in the last clip of the video is not chasing nor herding the animals. It is back quite a distance. It is the compression of the lens I was using that makes it and the animals look so close. I was sitting in the middle seat of the snow coach and shooting through the windshield with a 600mm lens which made everything look closer.
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Nestled along the rugged coastline of Northern California, Point Reyes National Seashore stands as a beacon of natural beauty and biodiversity. This pristine stretch of land encompasses over 71,000 acres of protected wilderness.