Yellowstone’s Baby Season

… and what a season it is!

I just came back from two days in the park; not only are there tons of babies, the griz are out of their dens and starting mating season. It was a wildlife watcher’s paradise. The bison were thin; signs of a hard winter.

 It was hard to see their ribs showing, but the grass is plentiful, there’s still a lot of snow on the surrounding mountains which will melt and make the grass even better, and there were babies.  

The plight of the bison remains so painful; officials were planning on “hazing” (LOVE that word — not) them out of the west side of the Park (justoutside the twon of WEst Yellowstone) back in last week. Don’t know whether that’s been stopped yet, but I know a bunch of groups wrote Montana’s Gov. and said, please, stop this.  

 

I got to see the my first “bear in the wild” and actually saw SEVERAL bears; here’s one with her two “cubs of the year” who were frolicking and playing in a large field, just like you see on TV shows. What a profound blessing to witness this.  (I grew up in New York City where the wildest animal I ever saw was a pigeon…).  

 

Then I got to see my first “grizzly in the wild” and it was intense. There is something about them that defies common language; perhaps because their are the top of the food chain, perhaps because they are a true predator, perhaps because they are so beautiful, perhaps because they are threatened. But this was magnificent. The bear was below a bridge, eating the remains of a bison carcass. Because we were safe above the river, it was easy to sit there for an hour and watch.

 Amazing.

I met an author and Jungian therapist named Ellen Macfarland who’s written a soon to be published book about recovery from trauma and the role animals can play in that recovery. She talks about wolves and bears.

I heard too this weekend the wonderful Jim Halfpenny who lives just outside Yellowstone who told a tale called “The Woman Who Married a Bear” and it was so moving. Google it and you’ll see variations of it come up in several indigenous cultures’ stories and so-called fairy tales. 

Seeing bears– well, really, any uncommon animal in the wild is a privilege these days, and certainly so in America, where we have, truly, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Yellowstone National Park is quickly becoming the last place in America where all our native species that were here before we moved in and built houses and railroads and gravel pits and highways and skyscrapers and so on and so on .. still live, as undisturbed as is possible in a place that receives about 3 million visitors a year, all leaping out of their cars to take pictures like the ones above. Capturing the image… capturing the wild… capturing the last gasp of wildness in this country where so little wild remains. There is a simultaneous joy and deep sadness while watching this bear in the spring sunlight, eating in relaxation, safe in Yellowstone.

God help this bear if he leaves Yellowstone, though.

The Feds are wanting to take america’s grizzly off the Endangered Species List, as they have “recovered” but there’s not a scientist who thinks that’s true. Worse, global warming will affect their habitat AND there food sources, and they will instintively want to head north. Problem is that they wll have to cross a few highways to get to Canada where they might (might — check out Canada’s lame attitude towards bears, makes America look like one big conservation org…) be able to survive.

Someone wrote that we are the only species in the natural world who “soils their nest” and that we are commiting slow ecocide — of the species called humans. When you think about it, it’s true.

Why?

Save the griz. Do what you can to help them live.

 

Cowboys and Indians

It’s so cool living in the West. A dream come true,really. 

In the last 7 days, I got to experience my first ever live horse auction, AND my first authentic Pow Wow.

The horse auction came complete with an auctioneer who called the horses out to the stadium one by one, by a number they had painted on their rear end. They’d been colts in training for the past several years with MSU Equine Program students, and it showed. amazingly calm, sane, well trained 3 year olds.

The students rode demos first, then the auction began.

Men with their families, whispering and jotting donw notes on which horse they liked; the auctioneer telling the audience that they were getting away with murder because the bids were so low… the small of horses, hay, the young students sad at having to give up the horse they’d put so many hours on.. the young, horse crazy girls, “Oh Dadd, PLEASE? I LOVE him! That one RIGHT THERE! Please can’t I have THAT ONE??”

The bidding began. Men in cowboy hats raising their numbers.

The bidding went high for some, flat for others.

I know now where I will get my horse next year.  There were some truly amazing horses at this sale. 

Then there was the Pow Wow.

S

Boys, girls, men, little ones, boys…. dressed to the nines, swirling, stomping dancing. Drummers drumming. Bells on their feet and on their costumes.  The colors, amazing.