I assume it has something to do with not having a digital camera to play with, but I've been crafting yet more banners for this journal. Not sure if I'll actually have Andrew put these in the queue, but here they are, just for fun.

Spotted this bald eagle feeding on a deer carcass just east of Home on the Range, along with a crop of crows and ravens. Eventually ended up joining a golden eagle or two sitting on the rocks to the north.

We had stopped on a wide spot in the switchbacks climbing the Seminoes, the heelers for a pee break, me to collect a branch of ponderosa pine for the plant identifications in Coal Mine Town, knocking the rime frost off to do so, when I spotted this ram and a ewe on the slope above us. Two brown silhouettes feeding peacefully away in the land of white. This observation is most significant because we are still internally debating the wisdom of bringing in more bighorn sheep into this area. The politics, logistics and bureaucracy of doing so being considerably simpler if we would be supplementing a still existing population of sheep, rather than bringing in something new to a place where they had gone extinct.

So there's at least two still surviving here. And a breeding pair, to boot. Bosses said on Friday, it's a supplement.

This cottontail was one of three, sitting out sunning themselves on the first day of sunshine after the early November storm. They were sitting by a cattleguard in the new county road fence, which provided perfect security. Anything dangerous shows up, just dive through the snow and between the metal bars into safety. The antelope were less thrilled with the new fence, their tracks pacing along it for more than two miles before finally finding the end of the wire to cross.

Cutting deer and elk throats to collect samples for chronic wasting disease testing was such a new, big thing this fall, it seemed appropriate to have a banner for it, even if a little bloody. The lymph nodes here were from an elk head deposited in the CWD "head barrel" our lab folks set up at the local meat processors'. I waited until we had a day with temps up in the 30s before even trying to carve on the deposited heads, so they were partially thawed. Which, like with meat for the table, made them actually easier to handle than when fresh. (I'm not even sure if Andrew or Sammy will okay this banner for running.)

Spotted this little woodpecker hopping around in the aspen trees in the regional office parking lot. Trees which surprisingly still had leaves on them. And was nearly ignored as he drummed after some sort of prey in a knot in the branch.

You know, when a woodpecker is furiously drumming after food on a cold day, it takes a lot of pictures before you can get lucky enough to have a shot with the eyes open and the head back.

This gorgeous bird is a gyrfalcon, four to five years old, if I remember correctly. A falconer's captive-raised bird, he had just taken his first sage grouse of the season the day before (and consumed most of it).

You can read about my encounter with this cricket here.

I was looking for a geocache near this fence. Probably a foolish thing to do, considering the snow. Needless to say, didn't find it.

Have always enjoyed looking at these red rock formations, just off the highway to the regional office town. They set up a gravel crushing operation in one of the valleys amidst these rocks this summer, and I feared for the formations themselves. but so far it looks like there will just be a flat, grassy patch left when they leave, and no other major destruction.

These are branches on a dead pine, at the edge of a pullout overlooking Seminoe Reservoir. On an early November day, when all the world (except the bighorn sheep) was covered with frost.

I imagine these shots all look pretty much the same, but they're different to me. The entire canyon was like that as I drove through to the wing bee. Snow and ice on the canyon slopes and walls, and mists rising and falling over the cliffs above.