One more non-bird post from our Canadian Rockies trip before I begin sharing the Canuck birds. While driving down the roads in wilderness areas I tend to forget that critters are more numerous than people out there. Yes there are many tourists driving by but the roads take up such a minuscule area of the Canadian Rockies – the rest belongs to a variety of animals. We did see some turtles and reptiles (and birds) but anytime a mammal popped up it had our complete attention.
A small one we saw early on was a Hoary Marmot. It was about the size of a large raccoon and stayed on the side of the road about 100 yards ahead of us.
While zipping down the road enroute to our next birding site someone spotted something peeking out of grass so we came to a halt. To our surprise we saw a Badger there! I didn’t even know they still existed but this one was keeping an eye on us. A couple of days later we saw another one in the process of digging out a burrow.
Of course the stars of the show were the bears. We saw Black Bears and Grizzly Bears during our stay there. Several sighting took place at Watertown National Park but in all instances were were in our car when viewing them. First are two colors of Black Bear with the first one eating some berries and the second one sporting a beautiful cinnamon color.
The Grizzly Bear is the largest bear in the world. We happened to see a mama bear and her two cubs twice – once in the middle of the afternoon and the other around 8 PM. Fortunately everyone around stayed in their cars to observe the three forage – we were told that they like to eat dandelion flowers!
As you can see even the Grizzly cubs came in two shades of brown, too. It was such a treat to see these beautiful animals in the wild.
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Tremendous pictures!