Rocky Mountain - critters

No National Park blog thread would be complete without one devoted to the local critters. The usual suspects were up to their usual tricks.



A moment like this is incredibly stressful for the chipmunk loving tourist. On the one furry little paw, I know you’re not supposed to feed or touch the chipmunks. They’re wild animals who have to survive in a tough environment. It’s not good for them to become too tame or dependent on our food. On the other furry little paw, he’s just so cute. He came right up and begged for food and I’m going to give him nothing

Damn straight. I looked that chipmunk right in the eye and said “Don’t beg me for food, pal. Get a job.” The guy whose leg he was clinging to laughed so hard that the chipmunk ran away, thus sparing us the agony of not feeding him.



The best way to spot the critters is by watching the other tourists. Any time they swarm together at a single location it means they’ve scented a photo opportunity. Such was the case with this Rocky Mountain elk (thanks to Northern Drawl for critter identification services). Traffic stopped, cameras poked out of windows and people pressed three deep against the hillside from the road. The elk, of course, was supremely indifferent to all the excitement and steadfastly ate grass in splendid isolation.

There is one animal for which this excitement would be entirely justified, but which I did not, alas get to see. The pronghorn is a genuinely fascinating animal. It's a very old species, the last surviving member of its family. The whitetail deer is a distant relative, but pronghorn, unlike deer, have gallbladders. Pronghorn are the fastest land animal in North America and the second fastest in the world, slower only than the cheetah which, fortunately for the pronghorn, doesn't live around here. They also have enormous eyes that are equivalent to 8x binoculars and have a 320 degree field of vision. Way cool.



Of course, I did get to see plenty of deer. They seem to be everywhere. I saw this doe and faun outside the grounds of the park, when I was looking for the Shadowcliff Hostel. I was still feeling pretty scarred by the tragic suicide of Bambi in Montana, so I stopped the car and took a photograph while I waited for them to pass. A split second after I took this picture, the faun spotted me, made eye-contact for a moment, and then took off at a dead run into the woods. I guess the word about me has spread rapidly through the deer population. Beware of blonde Bambi killer in blue Volvo!