Okay, here it is.

Your annual elk counting final exam.

How many elk are in this image?

Yeah, the pilot and I managed to get up for our annual count of the Ferris and Seminoe elk this afternoon. Mostly clear skies, little wind, and the best snow cover he and I can remember in 25 years of flying this area. Most of it fresh from this past weekend.

So yeah, we found some elk.

Oddly enough, probably not all of them. Some heavy tracks in a few high places suggests we may have missed a few small bull groups. But the vast majority of the rest of the herd we found.

Got incredibly brave this year and took only the digital camera along for the photos. Scared to death it would react too slow to get some of the groups, or the autofocus wouldn't be right, giving me just an image of dark smears. That happened a couple times, but not on any of the herd photographs.

Yes, we had to circle more often than with film photography, because we had to get the elk all bunched up together. With film, you just take rapid shots of large groups as you pass over, and mentally splice the groups together afterwards. With the sloooow reaction time of digital, that isn't possible. By the time the camera is ready for a second frame, you're a half mile past the elk.

So you circle three or four times to get everybody bunched up on open snow, then climb high for the shot.

Which are all bad things to do when your stomach dislikes flying like mine does, but it works.

And here it is, only four hours after our flight, and I'm already counting elk. No waiting for a week for the slides to be developed, no squinting through a 10X hand lens and sketching the herd to make sure you didn't double count.

Just jump up the contrast, and start marking elk with red dots.

Did get sick once, when the pilot spotted some animals off to the right, and made a gentle bank that direction. Then he spotted the real elk herd (the first was deer, actually), and made a sharp re-bank to the left.

Urg.

Bad thing was, my sick sack sprung a major leak. As in, the bottom of the bag wasn't there.

Pants, shirt and vest are in the laundry right now.

Good thing was, I had been sucking on strawberry cream candies, so the plane smelled like strawberries rather than, well, you know.

Other good thing?

Seeing so many elk, and not a one staying down on the ground. (And on that note, wife advises our elk story was on Paul Harvey today).

Have fun with the elk count quiz.

And be grateful I didn't give you the image that had 30-some deer mixed in with 152 elk.