Skip the Bear Jams this Summer

How to avoid the crowds this summer even in places like Yellowstone National Park

Written by Jared Lloyd, founder of PhotoWILD Magazine

Yellowstone is a paradox.

It’s one of the wildest ecosystems in North America and one of the most congested. Parking lots overflow. Pullouts stack up with long lenses and RVs. It’s elbow-to-elbow wilderness. And if a single grizzly shows up near the road, you can end up with a slow-motion ballet of brake lights stretching all the way from Hayden Valley to Bozeman, Montana.

But there’s another Yellowstone, one that most visitors completely overlook.

In all honesty, the bird photography here is a year-round event. But the good stuff comes as spring and summer unfold across the ecosystem. These are relative terms though. Calendar dates can be largely ignored. In the GYE, the spring equinox brings about sage grouse strutting their stuff defiantly in the face of extinction from oil and gas operations down in the lower elevations, while at the same time, subalpine meadows where dusky grouse eke out a living are still locked in the deep freeze of winter. This is why words like spring and summer don’t hold the same meaning in this ecosystem.

Come June and July, the place to be if you want to find and photograph birds here are the aspen groves and wetlands. But these two vastly different types of habitats are shockingly good for different reasons.

When it comes to aspen trees, it’s all about the soft wood. Aspens are the trees of choice for cavity excavating woodpeckers everywhere this species grows. And the importance of this tree species for these birds seems to reach a fever pitch here in the Northern Rockies.

Woodpeckers, or what our Spanish speaking friends to the south call carpenteros, are ecological engineers. These are the architects of the bird world, building house and home for scores of other species who are unable to excavate cavities themselves. Since aspen trees grow in distinct groves across the Northern Rockies, concentrating woodpecker activity to these areas, you can find birds and small arboreal mammals in this areas that border on the absurd at times. I have found single trees with eight active nesting cavities, surrounded by aspens filled with other nests.

There is a real benefit for primary and secondary cavity nesting birds to be clustered up like this in the form of the old adage of there being safety in numbers. With a hundred nests in a small grove of aspens, you may have two – three hundred birds using this habitat. That’s a lot of eyes looking out for nest raiding predators like the American marten and short-tailed weasel.

If you find a nursery grove of these aspens, you can spend days filling memory cards in an area the size of a single acre. In a single grove, it’s not uncommon to find nearly eye-level opportunities with red-shafted northern flickers, mountain bluebirds, violet-green swallows, red-naped sapsuckers, mountain chickadees, and red-breasted nuthatches to name just a few. And all of these may be in the exact same tree.

Red-Naped Sapsucker on Aspen Tree

Of all the many species of woodpeckers in the forest, I think it’s the red-naped sapsuckers that fascinate me the most. These birds are known as sapsuckers due to the habit of drilling sap wells in trees. If you have ever gone for a hike in the woods and noticed a tree with hundreds or even thousands of small holes in neat rows around the tree, this was the handy work of a sapsucker.

The sap wells play double duty for these woodpeckers diets. Not only do they consume the sugary tree sap that oozes out, but they also pick off and eat all of the insects that are also attracted to the sugary water.

Other birds have picked up on the fact that sapsuckers equate to a smorgasbord of different food sources. And hummingbirds such as the ruby-throated hummingbird are well known for following sapsuckers through the forest as they try to find these sugary bounties.

Red-naped sapsuckers are one of many different species of cavity nesters you can easily find and photograph in the old growth aspen stands around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

The best places for this are down in Grand Teton National Park – Yellowstone’s southern neighbor. The overpopulated herds of elk long ago destroyed the great stands of aspen trees in Yellowstone in the absence of wolves and the ecology of fear. In the Tetons, however, you can still find towering old growth stands of these trees. And it’s these old stands that are always the most productive.

Wetlands overflow with bird life in this region for a variety of reasons. Like the soft and somewhat pliable nature of aspen trees, which concentrates woodpecker activity, wetlands tend to concentrate just about everything else in this ecosystem.

Here’s a potentially new term that you should become acquainted with in your quest for ecological literacy: riparian zone.

A riparian zone is a type of ecotone (transition zone) where terrestrial habitat meets water. Across places like Wyoming, riparian zones make up a little less than 1% of the available habitat, while harboring some 80% of all wildlife in the region.

Yes. You read this right. A single type of habitat that makes up less than 1% of the geography, plays house and home to 80% of all the regions wildlife. In other words: find the riparian zone and you will find the wildlife – both avian and mammalian. This couldn’t be simpler.

If you want sandhill cranes with colts, find the wetlands with hardstem bulrush marsh. If you take a stroll through the cottonwoods along a river bottom, your chance at finding great horned owl nests will increase 100-fold (as well as moose). Great grey owls will be extremely active this time of year as they busy themselves feeding young throughout much of the day. And if you have read past articles in PhotoWILD Magazine, then you may already know that these birds have a very distinct correlation with boreal wetlands.

And those are just the charismatic avifauna. Both red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds nest in this region. As do cinnamon teal, harlequin ducks, Rocky Mountain trumpeter swans, green winged teal, and white pelicans. Don’t get me started and on species ducks that actually nest in woodpecker cavities like buffleheads, common goldeneye, barrows goldeneye, and hooded mergansers which can all be found here – meaning if you find an old nursery grove of aspens near wetlands or a riparian zone, you have hit the jackpot.

As you can see, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is more than antlers and teeth. Though the big charismatic mammals of the park tend to be the object of every wildlife photographer’s desire, the avian members of this community provide extraordinary opportunities as well. It is easy to develop tunnel vision in a landscape like this, becoming fixated on finding and photographing grizzlies for instance. But the intrigue of Yellowstone is that it is so much more than that. This is one of the largest intact ecosystems in the whole of the Northern Hemisphere. The diversity of wildlife is staggering, and the opportunities for the observant photographer are endless.

Most people come to Yellowstone hoping to see something wild.

But in doing so, they often follow the same paved loops, stop at the same viewpoints, and walk away with the same photographs as everyone else.

If you’re serious about creating work that stands out—and if you’re willing to explore the edges, hike the marshes, and study the trees—you’ll find a Yellowstone few others ever notice.

The birds are there. The opportunities are endless. And the crowds? Nowhere in sight.

While this article focuses on photographing Yellowstone, the bigger idea here is transferable: shifting your focus toward the so-called “smaller majority” of life—or at least toward species that aren’t on every visitor’s checklist—is often the best way to have a place all to yourself. And even if photographing owls or woodpeckers isn’t your thing, the simple act of getting off the road and into the backcountry will open up a whole new world of photographic opportunities.

Most wildlife photographers stick to the roads because it’s easy—the same reason tourists do. In places like Yellowstone, Grand Teton, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Olympic National Park, it’s only a matter of time before you come across either an animal or a crowd gathered around one. But this strategy also guarantees you’ll be sharing the moment with everyone else.

If you want to find animals—and have them to yourself—even in the busiest parks, the key is understanding why those animals are where they are. Every species you’re after has specific habitat and food requirements. When you stumble across a bear, an elk, or a great gray owl from the road, what you’ve really found is one of the few places where those conditions are just right.

And once you understand what those conditions are, you can start looking for—and finding—them elsewhere. That’s where the magic happens.

This is why becoming a better naturalist is essential for becoming a better wildlife photographer.

Put simply: you can’t photograph what you can’t find.