Favoritos de muir

Ludicrous record but makes sense given the past 11C weather. Snowy as hell and flew out in front of @kaiden and I. Habitat pic and field sketch. Brown body with pale yellow outer wings, nothing else it could have been. Chased to get a photo but we were unsuccessful.

@aiva @thyggen thanks for the memo about incidentals / field sketches, I hope you’re proud of yourselves

Please see this observation for context on visitors to the remains of a hunter's moose kill: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/197200592

The trail cam was installed on Sept 12, 2021. The magpies and ravens showed up on the 13th, the first wolf on the 15th.

Please see this observation for context on visitors to the remains of a hunter's moose kill: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/197200592

The trail cam was installed on Sept 12, 2021. The magpies and ravens showed up on the 13th, the first wolf on the 15th.

Observed at Echo Lake Lodge, Chicago Creek Road, Idaho Springs, Clear Creek County, CO, USA

Edited to add: the silly story that I posted on the forum, which was inspired by this photo set.

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This is not something that I do all of the time, but every once in a while, a photo – or a series thereof – suggests a snippet of dialog, a movie scene, or something of the sort to me. For instance, this photo set reminded me of all of the various “how to survive a horror movie” lists out there. The script goes as follows:

Bird on right: “Did you hear that?”
Bird on left: “I didn’t hear anything.”
BoR: “Come on, you have to have heard that noise!”
BoL: “I didn’t hear anything, and if you’re smart, neither did you.”
BoR: “I’m going to go check it out.”
BoL: (looking up as her companion flies away) “Fine. If you run into a Loggerhead Shrike with a rusty fishhook, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

My brain can be a very strange place, somtimes. :laughing:

WARNING! Photos show a partially-eaten animal and may be disturbing for some people.
This moose was killed by a wolf. A local dog musher came up on it with his dog team and saw a lone wolf feeding on the moose's head. He described the encounter when he saw me and I went there with my camera and trail-cam. The moose was a young cow, probably almost a year old, and was extremely thin. I examined the tracks where the wolf chased the moose out of the woods onto a trail, then up the trail a short distance. The moose was lying in the trail. The wolf had eaten the tongue and a portion of the haunch. There were probably 50+ ravens nearby and I surmise that they got the eye and maybe the cheek. The first photo in the series shows a puncture wound above the hock. I put the trail cam on a nearby tree and left it overnight but no wildlife showed up besides ravens. This trail is only a mile or two from a rural residential area and is used by dog mushers, fat-bikers, skiers, and snowmachiners. Photo of the wolf tracks is in a separate observation (link is in comments).

Please go to this observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/197200592 for the backstory on this. This big, white adult first came to the moose kill on 9/15/21 but didn't return until 9/18. The long sequence of photos shows that it seemed to be very spooked by the camera. But it also returned several times as you can see by the time stamps.