For several weeks, photographer Kate Ochsman has been following the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep herds in Yellowstone National Park and shared the experience with us.
“This is the season of the rut. The males intimidate, dominate and eventually fight one another for the championship prize of breeding with the females and passing on his champion’s genes. The bighorn rut is unlike any rut I’ve seen. Elk and bison use brute strength and deafening sound delivered in a chaotic frenzy to intimidate and fight other bulls. Bighorn rams could not be more opposite. Their dominance display is a beautifully choreographed, ancient rocky mountain tango. It’s a dance of stillness, bowing, head nudges, and the very tango like kicking feet-usually aimed at another male’s sensitive bits. The photo above captures a moment of escalation in this tense dance between two friends. The final blow, the crescendo to this intricate dance, erupts with the fury of bashing skulls and horns in a thudded KOHW. The champion, already wearing his crown, enters his kingly right and breeds all the queens, providing another generation of Rocky Mountain princes and princesses.” Photo and words courtesy of Kate Ochsman.

Please remember to give them room and use your zoom #YellowstonePledge

Happy birthday, Badlands National Park in South Dakota. First established as a national monument in 1939, Badlands was redesignated as a national park in 1978. Visitors are often surprised by the park’s unexpected beauty. Wild pinnacles and buttes rise starkly out of the seemingly endless mixed grass prairie, a virtual sea of grasses that flow in the breeze towards the horizon. The landscape is dynamic – the light changes, the animals move, the tall spires weather and erode. Look closely and you’ll see every color of the rainbow painted in delicate brush strokes across this dramatic wilderness. And maybe a bighorn sheep, too. Photo by Jon Reynolds (www.sharetheexperience.org).