If you're a bird, I'm a bird

In my last post I mention going through Yellowstone and Jackson Hole, WY. We had a wonderful time on the drive. What wasn't so fun was waiting in line to pay to enter the park. We waited for at least an hour. Then, suddenly, the line started moving very fast. I began to think that everyone in front of us had already paid and were only showing their receipt to get back in. Then it's our turn at the window. The lady simply waved us through and said we just want to get the line moving, no fee today. It was sweet! Woo-hoo, no $25 entrance fee! We saw a few wildlife, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Michael and I feel like we've been through the park enough times to not need to stop at Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic Spring and other places like that. We pretty much just go to see wildlife now. We've only have a few out of the almost dozen times we've gone that there hasn't been a bear sighting. This time would be one of them, but we didn't even drive through the whole park.

When Michael and I were on our honeymoon, in Jackson Hole, we explored the town a little bit. This is the place that has the huge National Elk Refuge where they claim to winter over 1,000 elk. Pretty sweet, right? They do sleigh rides onto the refuge and take you right up to the elk, for a pretty penny. We wanted to do that for our honeymoon and decided it was too expensive. And I've wanted to do it ever since. Maybe one day. So instead of a horse drawn sleigh ride, we found this back road the you could actually drive your car on to the refuge. I think every time but once that we've driven that road, we've seen bighorn sheep. The first time we drove on it, we saw a heard of over 60 sheep! With a ton of rams too! Of course we take that road every chance we get. This time around we saw a coyote from just a few feet away. 

And add that to our collection of bighorn sheep pictures from this place. 

 Michael has been informed that he has to take a class in which he must identify 500 birds. He is allowed to think back to his past and write down any birds he can remember plus the birds he sees that semester. Since learning this, we have put our digital zoom to good use. We love our camera, absolutely love it, and I was just about devastated when we lost the memory card from it in January. Michael has been able to photograph quite a few birds. I think he's got close to 75 birds on his list, just from the ones he has pictures of. Just to brag on him a bit, here are a few, not even close to all, of the pictures he's taken.