Northwest Trek

Michelle mentioned my trip to Northwest Trek with Jeremy in her post about our Christmas vacation. She posted ONE of my pictures from that day (it was of two wolves fighting). Well, I took over 500 that day, and I've sifted through all of them to pick just 34 to share with you. They represent the variety of animals we saw that day.

Before we get to the pictures, there is, of course, a story that goes along with them. Jeremy really wanted to get out and take pictures of animals. He had read about this Northwest Trek place in one of the tourist advertisement hand-outs you find in restaurants or tourist information places. He wanted to rent a big 600mm (expensive!) lens for the day, but decided not to at the last minute. It's a good thing he did because it was raining when we left. It's about a 45 minute drive from my parents house and it had stopped raining for a little bit during the drive, but it was drizzling when we got there. We put on our waterproof gear and covered our cameras in plastic bags to protect them and we went on our way. Jeremy has two big lenses that we traded during the day, a 70-200mm and a 100-400mm. These are big lenses. We were asked at least once, if not twice, who we were shooting for. They were a little surprised when we said just for ourselves and just for fun!

There were two benefits of the rain that day: it kept most of the people away from the park and it brought most of the animals out of their hiding places! The animals were pretty active and there weren't that many people around. So, it was a great day. I took a little over 500 pictures and Jeremy took about three times as many as I did. You can see a few of them over at his website. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:

We started with the Lynx:
(got him sticking his tongue out)

The mountain lion:

The bobcat:

The bald eagles:




(this one has a bad left eye)
(the bald eagles were both flightless and they came right up close to us)
The bison:

The elk:
(I count 5 more in the background)
The mountain goat:

The bighorn sheep:
(just a baby)

The snowy owl:
(he's/she's winking at me)

(this one's laughing at me)
(another wink)

The great horned owl:


The barn owl:

The gray wolves:
(I think they wanted food from us)
(I'm glad there was a trench and a fence between us)

The red fox:

The squirrel:

The black bear:
(this guy is HUGE!)
(I think she wanted some food, too)
The wolverine:
(these two shots came out particularly sharp)

The otter:
(this shot was taken through glass)
The raccoon:
The only animals that weren't out were the grizzly bears. There had been some strong wind that day and the caretaker didn't want them out. So, I got some good shots! I just wish it had been a little brighter that day. A lot of my pictures were too dark. And I wish I had taken the pictures in RAW format. I could have tweaked the colors better had I done that. Still to come are pictures of WILD bald eagles from my trip with Jeremy up to the Skagit river and from Chambers Bay.