The primary focus of my annual mid-June trip to Pennsylvania Elk
Country is to photograph the elk calves, but they were extremely
skittish as I noted in the last post. I got the only decent calf photo
of the trip on Friday morning. As is so often the case it was extremely
foggy and I was cruising the hill waiting for it to lift a bit when I
saw a small group of cows with one calf about 25 yards from the road. I
parked well off of the roadway. Since the grass was tall I made no
effort to set the tripod up, but instead stood on the door sill of the
SUV, rested the 5D MKIII with 300mm f2.8 lens over the top of the
vehicle and fired several frames. It is good that I did not try to get
the tripod as the elk stood there less than a minute before running
away.
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| Foggy Morning Calf |
When one is looking for calves it is also common to
see different species of grassland birds. I have seen Bobolinks for
years, but always took video before and never got an acceptable still
photograph of one until Wednesday morning when I photographed one with
the Canon 70D and the 600mm F 4.0 lens.
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| Bobolink |
It was a bit more difficult to see bulls, but a young
bull was seen most mornings and evenings feeding or resting along the
edge of the food plot near the log cabin on the hill at the Porcupine
Run/Winslow Hill Viewing Area. In this case I took video for some
time with the Panasonic GH4 and 100-300mm Lumix lens before switching it
to still mode and firing a few still frames.
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| Young Bull With Cows |
I actually found quite a few bulls and
some were of respectable size for young animals, but none were had the
potential to grow truly exceptional racks this year. The 5x5 shown
below was one of the largest seen on this trip. He was traveling with a
bachelor group of three bulls and was the largest of that particular
group.
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| 5x5 Bull Peers At Camera |
Some would call this a large 5x5 while other veteran
elk photographers would chuckle and comment that large and 5x5 are not
compatible words. Whatever the case there seems to be quite a few bulls
of this size class out there this year and I plan to post some more
photos of them in the near future.
Originally published at
Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.
