yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Photographing the Wild Wolves of Yellowstone | Exposure


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

In Rogard Kipling's The Jungle Book, he has a quote that says, "For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack." Yellowstone lives and breathes wolves. In the last 20 years, I wanted to photograph them and bring that to light. This was my first project with National Geographic. I'd been in Yellowstone for several months. My role was solely as Nick Nichols' assistant. He suggested I pick up the wolf issue in Yellowstone and pick up wild wolves inside the park.

Up until the mid-80s, biologists thought that ecosystems were built from the bottom up, from the vegetation all the way up through the insects and all the way up through the layers, and that the top predators just kind of fed off of the extras. Yellowstone has given the world an opportunity to see that it's very much on both sides; that an apex predator is a key part of the landscape.

We were able to partner with the park's biologist to have this mutual relationship with them where we could get images for them that they had never seen before and try to capture behaviors that they had never seen before. My favorite photograph from this project is definitely three wolves feeding on a bison carcass along the Yellowstone River. This was a scene that we were able to kind of pull the curtain back on Yellowstone and the wolves. You know, the situation just came together.

One of the primary tools in wildlife photography that I use is camera traps. The goal of camera traps is fairly simple; it's to give the viewer an intimate experience with an animal that you can't get any other way. Oftentimes, when you put a camera on a carcass, you know, you can't be there. You have to put the camera, set it up, and leave, and walk away and hope for the best.

And the bears are probably going to wreck your camera; that's pretty much a given on this project. But you could get a couple of images that allow you to open up this world of the wolves that people had never seen before. If there's one thing that people could take away from the photographs that I've created of wolves in Yellowstone, I'd say it's that the wolves have an integral part of the ecosystem in Yellowstone.

All throughout their home range, they control the big grazers; they control the elk and the bison and the deer. The animals are healthier throughout, and the wolf has just given balance to the entire ecosystem. Political boundaries mean nothing to nature; it's a permeable boundary, and they just move back and forth as their biology dictates.

More Articles

View All
Making a Bow By Hand | Live Free or Die
So the back of the bow is looking pretty nice, and I’m going to start shaping the bow with the axe. Take it down to one continuous grain that’ll provide the most strength. Hunter gatherer Matt has only caught small squirrels since returning to his desert…
The Pirate's Perspective | Lawless Oceans
Why did you want to go into piracy? But what made you want to conduct piracy locally? Is it a little way you or the other one for the oven can grow up? Yeah, I’m getting my devil on. Call myself the other one until the work was enough. The National Guard…
Geometric series convergence and divergence examples | Precalculus | Khan Academy
[Instructor] So here we have three different series. And what I would like you to do is pause this video and think about whether each of them converges or diverges. All right, now let’s work on this together. So, just as a refresher, converge means that…
Tuna Gods Sacrifice | Wicked Tuna
You know, I don’t remember marking so many fish coming. That downline not bitin’. I have to catch fish because I have responsibilities on land. You know, my kids depend on me. I have tuition to deal with, so it really takes a tremendous toll mentally on t…
COLD HARD SCIENCE: SLAPSHOT Physics in Slow Motion - Smarter Every Day 112
Hey, it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So it might surprise you to know that we have hockey at the university that I went to. Anyway, today we’re gonna talk about the physics of a slap shot. You’re getting Smarter Every Day. [theme music]…
Letting Someone Go | Taoism for Broken Hearts
Letting Someone Go | Taoism for Heartbreak The philosophy of Taoism revolves around letting go, accepting, yielding, and going with the flow. All Taoist sages seem to agree that it’s better to be detached and indifferent, allow change to happen, and move…