I’ve been doing some house cleaning on my hard drives, going through and getting rid of the junk I should have thrown away a long time ago. It has been a slow process because I keep letting myself get sidetracked when I find a film clip or a photo I didn’t know I had. This afternoon I found the photo below. I know from looking at the meta-data it was originally a slide taken in 1981 during a trip to Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada. I don’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday but I remember this photo. We came around a corner on a trail totally exhausted after climbing up really high to see the Burgess Shale, famous because it contains the fossil remains of lots of soft bodied animals like jellyfish. Fossils are normally only created from organisms that have preservable hard parts, so the Burgess fossils are famous, among paleontologists anyway. When we came around a corner there was this dark little guy up in the top of a small conifer. We stopped dead in our tracks, expecting it to run, but it didn’t. It just sat there and looked at us. What a cutie! Now the question is, is it a fisher or a pine marten? It is dark like a fisher but it does have a couple of light patches below its ears and a little light spot on its neck.
I know the photo below is a pine marten. I took it up in Jardine, above Gardiner, in early spring. It was dragging pieces of mule deer stomach up into a cottonwood and eating them. That’s why he is licking his chops here. The mule deer must have had a lot of grass in its stomach because there was a trail of grass from the dead deer to the tree. That is how we found the pine marten.
The photo below is a weasel. Weasels, pine martens, fishers, and otters are all in the weasel family. We were in a big group of photographers in Yellowstone photographing a grizzly sow with 2 cubs near Dynamite Curve when this guy suddenly popped up out of a log right in front of us. I was way more excited about getting a photo of him than the grizzlies. I love grizzlies, especially the cubs, but I have tons of grizzly photos and maybe 3 weasel photos.
These are the otters that lived at Trout Lake last year. She is a super good mother. The babies always had more trout than they could eat and she spent tons of time playing with them. I got to watch them once up at Buck Lake and had them all to myself. I am pretty sure there aren’t any trout in Buck Lake, but there are tons of salamanders. She and her babies swam slowly around the edge of the lake while she dove for salamanders and passed them to the babies. They ate them like popsicles. I felt sorry for the salamanders but it was really fun to watch the babies eating.
So you tell me. Do you think there are 3 species of weasels here, or four?
I think it’s four, but they’re all beautiful pictures no matter. I think the first one is different because of it’s eyes they are differently shaped and lay with a different angle than the pine marten’s.
We were in the park for two weeks “animal watching” and we did not see any either.
I think it is four but it doesn’t matter , I just love the pictures ! You rarely get to see these guys, let alone photograph them ! Congratulations !
Wonderful photos. They make me smile. Four species. Otters and weasels all belong to the Mustelidae family.
First, I am jealous that you have all of those weasel images! LOL and Second, I don’t know – what is the answer?
I didn’t mean it to be a test. I didn’t know the answer. I was thinking the dark one might be a fisher but Max Waugh weighed in and thinks it is a dark pine marten because of its ears. He says martens have longer, more triangular ears. So I guess the answer is 3. You know now that I think about it I haven’t seen a weasel or a pine marten this year.