With all the cancelled travel this year, I feel very fortunate to have made it over to Yellowstone at the start of June. This was my fifty-first trip to the park—for fun I’ve been ranking the first fifty trips in my blog, for those that are interested—and I brought my father with me this time. He took me on my very first Yellowstone trip back in 1988, so it was fitting to kick off the second half-century of trips this way.
We had a fruitful two weeks, a visit that was highlighted by some interesting wildlife behavior I either had not photographed well, or had never seen before. Yellowstone always presents something new… There are numerous documented instances of American badgers and coyotes hunting together (some of you may remember the viral video of these two species traveling together from earlier in the year). Friends and colleagues have photographed this in the park over the years, but it took me this long to see it.
Each predator is basically hoping the other will spook some food into its waiting jaws. The coyote watched as the badger investigated various ground squirrel burrows, but any time the coyote started exploring, the badger would inevitably follow. As it turned out, while we were watching the coyote did manage to catch a squirrel, though without any help from the badger.
This photo may not be very dynamic, but I thought it represented the temporary truce between the two species well enough.
Canon 1DXII
Canon 600mm + 1.4x
ISO 1000
1/1250th
f/7.1
Max