I was walking along the edge of a North Fork meadow the other evening. The light was failing and the odds of getting a good picture were slim. Then I saw a wolf. It trotted off and I took a few frames, but it was a long way away, at least 150 yards. I kept walking and the wolf circled around a patch of trees and laid down about 100 yards away. By then the light was even worse. The wolf heard me and sat up. I took a few frames and figured I had squat. I had to underexpose a good stop and a half, but when I got home and checked the images, I noticed I had a sharp shot of the wolf's one eye. The photo is a bit grainy and the crop is very tight (this picture is barely six inches wide). But it works.

Did an afternoon hike to a North Fork lake and ran across this river otter. He (or she) definitely saw me, but still decided to a take a nap next to this beaver lodge. It's better to be lucky sometimes than good. Taken with a 400mm with a 1.4 teleconverter. With a 1.5 crop factor, that's about 840 mm of lens.

Yesterday brought light snow to the Park, but in the afternoon it switched to rain — heavy at times. But at least it was blissfully warm (like 40 or so). The gray days of Glacier have begun. The sun will shine infrequently from now until April, unless we get another one of those huge arctic air masses. (We usually get one or two a year). The east side isn't as bad, but the wind makes even a cool day feel much colder. The wettest month is actually June, but the days are so long that a break or two in the clouds makes a June day all the better.

Polebridge (and all of Glacier, for that matter) dipped down to below zero over the past few days, including a reading of nine below last night. Nine below! Here's the problem, September was so warm, that the trees didn't really didn't turn. Many of them were still green when this cold snap hit. Now they're simply frozen green trees that will, eventually turn brown. I was out all day yesterday and had planned a couple of hikes but ended up doing only one. There were a host of different bird species, from ducks to Wilson's snipe, huddled in the comparatively warm waters of lower McDonald Creek. With that many birds around I also saw a fair number of predators wanting to snatch them, including a coyote, and three different hawk species — a red tailed, a sharp-shinned and a northern harrier. Here, a northern harrier takes wing above the creek.

In this business you often find things completely by accident. I had stopped at a favorite spot to listen for bugling elk (there's a monster roaming the western hills of Glacier, photographing him has proven years of frustration) when I heard a different kind of howl — a coyote. Not sure who or why this guy was howling, but it never saw me until I came out of the brush, which was a mistake on my part.