| Question: "I'm coming to Yellowstone later this month and I would really like to find a bobcat. Any advice?"
-Michael Humphry Over the years of living and working inside of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, I sort of became known for my bobcat photographs. Questions would pour in on a regular basis. Some from photographers who were planning on vacationing in the area. Others from people on a documentary assignment for the BBC and Nat Geo. Though I may use the word "questions" here, really, it's just one question. "How do you find them?" This really is the million-dollar question though isn't it? And not just for photographing bobcats. This is the greatest challenge that faces all wildlife photographers. As I have written about many times before, all the technical expertise in the world does us no good if we can't find the animals to begin with. With bobcats, like most animals, the answer to such questions is seasonal. What time of year? That means everything. And the reason this means everything is that all life on Earth is driven by just two things: food and sex. I talked about this at great length in the Fall 2020 edition of the Journal of Wildlife Photography. But knowing exactly what your subject is eating and the details behind how and when they go about looking for mates is the secret sauce in wildlife photography. Take our bobcat here for example. . . In the Northern Rockies, bobcats often overlap with lynx. Technically, bobcats are a species of lynx. The binomial name for these cats is Lynx rufus. But we aren't going to get into that right now. The fundamental difference between these two species though, is that the true lynx is designed serious offroading through deep snow. The size of their paws gives them the floatation needed to negotiate and thrive in DEEP powdery snow. Bobcats, on the other hand, don't come with large enough tires for that. Although both lynx and bobcats will prey on species like snowshoe hare, only the lynx are specialized at doing this year-round and in deep snow. Once the snow piles up, once things start getting deep in the boreal forests or lodgepoles, bobcats migrate to areas where there is less snow, where they can continue to be mobile, and hunt, and survive. Yellowstone National Park is unique in that the whole of the place is one gigantic super volcano. Though all we tend to see is a great big plateau that averages about 2,000 feet higher than the surrounding landscape, the park is really an ancient and ever migrating volcano in the sky. Do you remember the concept of plate tectonics? How that the Earth's crust is like a giant jigsaw puzzle ever moving around overtop of a sea of magma – more or less? Well, there is a giant magma chamber, what geologists refer to as a Hot Spot under Yellowstone. It's so large, it's so hot, and it's so close to the Earth's surface, that whatever happens to be overtop of it, is lifted into the air from all that heat and magma below. And since the Earth's crust moves and drifts and changes location all the time, this isn't the first place that the super volcano has lived. If you were to look at a map of the western half of the United States and locate Yellowstone, you would notice a peculiar parabolic shape in the topography to its west. This parabola, with Yellowstone sitting at the apex, was created by gigantic explosion after gigantic explosion after gigantic explosion as the volcano erupted and the North American Plate drifted ever west. I'll stop here with the geology lesson. But this is all relevant for two reasons: The geography, created by the super volcano over time, works to actually funnel low pressure systems up the parabola and straight toward the plateau. Because of the magma chamber raising the earth here an extra 2,000 feet, storms get trapped on the plateau and in the surrounding mountains, which are then forced to release water in the form of snow in order to continue marching east. Because of the volcano, Yellowstone gets more snow than the surrounding region. Because the Yellowstone Plateau is superheated from the magma chamber below, many of the creeks and rivers are fed by the geothermal areas. The Madison River, for example, is the combination of the Fire Hole River and the Gibbon. Both of these tributaries find their origin in geyser basins. This means that the water is warm enough, even 20 miles downriver, to never freeze in the winter – not even when it's minus 40 degrees. So, what does any of this have to do with finding and photographing bobcats? Because of the geology of the volcano, the region gets a significant amount of snow in the winter making travel and hunting all but impossible for bobcats in most areas. But also because of the volcano, many of the rivers and creeks remain ice free throughout the winter and hold significantly less snow around their banks due to the heated water. The result? Bobcats migrate to the thermally heated rivers while lynx remain up high, in deep snow, chasing snowshoe hares and red squirrels in the forest. There is another part of this equation though, and that's waterfowl. Because places like the Maddison, Fire Hole, Gibbon, Gardiner, and Boiling Rivers remain ice free year-round, these also happen to be the key areas where ducks and swans are able to survive here as well. And ducks equal food for bobcats. So, we know now that geology, climate, and biology all come together here to place both bobcats and waterfowl in the exact same place come winter. Therefore, the only question that remains is exactly HOW these bobcats go about hunting ducks. From the photograph above though, you probably have already figured this part out. The cats exploit the log jams on the sides of the river as hunting blinds. Bobcats stuff themselves up inside of the logjams and simply wait for a Barrows golden eye or a Rocky Mountain trumpeter swan to come floating past. When it happens, when it all lines up just right, the cat will launch itself out of the log jam and directly on top of the bird where it sets about both trying to strangle and drown its prey before dragging it through the water and back to shore. Yes, bobcats swim. And yes, they can pull something like a swan, that is much larger than they are, out of the water. So, if you want to find bobcats in Yellowstone in the winter, you look toward the ice-free rivers and the logjams along their banks. If there is fresh snow it makes things easier. You can simply search for tracks in the snow leading to logjams. Bobcats are one of the few mammals that are going to actually climb out onto downed trees over the water like this. The fresh tracks can often help you figure out which logjams you should spend time with. From there, it's about patience. It's about sitting in the snow, across the bank, and waiting them out. Many times, I find the bobcat only by seeing a pair of eyes staring at me from deep inside after 20 plus minutes of searching every nook and cranny of a logjam with a pair of binoculars. Because understanding the biology and biography of wildlife is so incredibly important to successful wildlife photography, and because there is quite literally no other working wildlife photographer teaching or writing about this part of the equation, I decided to make this type of information a fundamental part of the Journal of Wildlife Photography. Though in depth articles have been published about this topic since I first created the Journal, starting with the Fall 2020 issue, you will find regularly scheduled articles in each issue geared specifically toward teaching you how to find wildlife in addition to how to photograph them. Learn more about the Fall 2020 issue of the Journal of Wildlife Photography here: https://journalofwildlifephotography.com/jowp-fall-2020/ | 
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