Badlands Bighorns
It’s so nice to be vaccinated and back to traveling freely and photographing again this summer. Every trip brings a surprise, and one of the highlight trips from this summer thus far was to the Badlands of South Dakota. I had not visited here since my college days, and I was excited at the prospect of capturing an awesome sunrise. After waking up at o-dark-thirty and making a 70 mile drive only to find cloudless skies and a mediocre sunrise, it quickly became apparent I needed to spend the day exploring first, and come back later at sunset. So glad to have made the decision to return a second day for a sunset shot, since the evening search for landscapes was made even better with some very cooperative bighorn sheep. The mix of wildlife in an epic environment was one of the more memorable days of the summer. Hope you enjoy the images!
A bighorn sheep ewe showing off her balance skills on a knife-edge clifftop in the Badlands. Rocky Mountain bighorns were native to this area, but populations declined due to hunting, until they were reintroduced in 1964. The badlands now holds about 250 bighorn. This female is a nursing mother, and her lambs will stay with her herd for life. I captured this using a slow shutter speed (1/40 s) with a wide angle zoom and a narrow aperture to bring the background into focus. Luckily, she posed steady just long enough to capture a sharp image.
The cliffs provide protection from predators. Bighorns are grazers, and after eating grasses and brush in the lowland areas, they retreat to the cliffs to digest and relax. According to the Park Service, there are few predators for these animals, and the most common means of death is by disease (eg., pneumonia) or when a lamb missteps on a cliffside.
During the harsh light of daytime, the hills here are mostly a drab white. As evening light sets in however, the colors pop out as glorious reds, oranges and golds. This light lasted only for a few minutes, so glad I was ready to press the shutter.
Above: A rambunctious lamb playing peekaboo on the clifftops. Below: Black-tailed prairie dogs are also one of the fun species to watch here, and critically important to the prairie ecosystem. With their network of burrows, prairie dogs are considered a keystone species that over 150 other species either rely on or benefit from, including the endangered black-footed ferret. Bighorn sheep and other grazing animals all benefit from the grass trimming work that the prairie dogs perform, which contributes to the nutritional quality of the grasslands.
