Good evening my Great Friends! Its 45° right now outside my Houston home, after an afternoon high of 72°. Happy Thanksgiving every one! One both sides of the Atlantic! It was indeed a good day and there is just something magical about Thanksgiving. OK give the video a few seconds and it will stabilize. Im using so much telephoto that just my pressing the record button on my video camera caused it to vibrate. I need a bigger/sturdier tripod. SO - I dont want to spoil anyones dinner here and really I have much more graphic video than this and this but this clip is a bear kill lite one. This is not for the faint or queasy here. But Its just one of the most extraordinary scenes Ive ever chanced across in the natural world. We had just driven into the park on our first day there and and after only 30 minutes came right up on a grizzly and his kill ( we thought/hoped they would all be in hibernation by Nov 17th but obviously not :) ) . Don Dunlap I can see you cringing (he is manager of a TV station and one of best best life-time friends in the world) because of the shaky unedited video. I will eventually edit all of this into something intelligable, but for now I just wanted to share some unedited video with my Facebook family here. I had to use 2000mm of Leica lens here and we calculated that it was about .7 miles away, just like with the black wolves. The back-ground noise is people talking; some of them spotters with their big telescopes and some tourists who left their cars running so they wouldnt be cold --- effectively destroying my sound :( . OH and with such high magnification you can see heat waves coming up from the snow. But we were really smiling at how this bear was so irritated with all the ravens who immediately found the bears kill. I think the ravens must communicate to each other somehow because they seem to come out of nowhere in a situation like this. There was some debate among us as to weather the bear had killed an elk or buffalo. I say its an elk. The bear left after about 30 minutes with a large piece of meat for the road, then no one saw him afterwards (he probably came back at night). For several days afterwards, however we saw ravens, coyotes, and even wolves were seen (not by me unfortunately) dining on the left overs. My network of spotters with their big scopes reported that the wolves showed up 3 days later and picked over the remains for a while, then moved on. Many of the professional photographers staked out the site, hoping the bear would come back, but he never did -- he either headed for his hibernation den or came back at night. Im not one to just stay in a blind or stake out a certain location like this for hours or days, like some wildlife photographers do.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 04:27:13 +0000
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