The Bighorn rut season is in full swing in Waterton Canyon and yesterday seemed like the perfect morning to get some pictures.We arrived fairly early and made the mountain bike ride up to the Marsten Dam where we usually find animals, but no sheep were to be seen. Not to worry though, often the sheep don’t make it down the mountainside until afternoon so we decided to take a short break to hydrate. After a little bit other visitors told us the ewes were coming down the mountain at about the 1.25 mile point, so we mounted up and headed back downstream.
There were a couple of young rams challenging each other but the big time head butting that we had hoped for did not seem to be materializing… Of course the rams were out in full force the day before, the story of my life 🙁 So we hung around and photographed the ews and the young rams for a bit, but it wasn’t long before they were heading right back up the mountainside for their afternoon naps.
So there’s the dilemma, do you hang around for a few hours hoping they come back down, or do you move on and try another subject? Well we decided to leave and try the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which turned out to be a good choice as I captured some of the nicest whitetail deer images ever! At one point one of the bucks started running right at us, which was a great chance to try out the focusing system on my Canon R7. My 90D is a great camera, but is terrible when it comes to tracking a rapidly approaching animal or bird. I’m happy to report the the R7 handled the situation with flying colors and I really like this image! In fact I have uploaded it to the Artist Choice library on my website!
I wanted to get a nice capture of the buffalo too, but they were either walking away from us, lying down in bad light or too far away, so the buffalo were a big fail. We saw a big hawk, but he flew off while we were trying to get into position. The prairie dogs were out in force so we captured a few images of them, but the coyote that we were hoping for must have already gotten a full belly before we arrived!
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