All God's Creatures - Dakota Vacation blog post #5

I’d been blogging about our vacation to the Dakotas in chronological order, but I thought I needed to veer off the tracks for this one. We saw such a long list of wildlife on this trip that I couldn’t wait any longer to share them all.

At our first stop at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the group of people next to us at this overlook kept talking about the lone buffalo they saw. I took a picture of the area where they described him as standing, but I never did see him.

Until later, when I cropped the picture on my laptop. We saw lots more buffalo over the next couple of days, so I’ll bore you with more pictures of them later. 

The first wildlife we saw, though, was actually earlier in the day. We were so excited to see pronghorn antelope out in a field. Little did we know we would see dozens more.

Same with prairie dogs.

We saw a fair number of mule deer too.

At first I thought this was a white-tailed deer because her coloring was like the ones we have back home and the mule deer we’d seen were so grey. But look at those ears.

Here is the white-tailed deer we saw. Don’t know why I couldn’t get her in focus. Probably coz my camera didn’t care because I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of these deer in my own backyard.

A rabbit. We have a half-tame rabbit in my yard at home too. 

A stupid turkey. Again, like, I never see them at home. But I’m counting everyone here.

Canadian geese. About the last place I’d expect to see a pair of them. 

Fish in a stream. I’m thinking brook trout.

A turtle. Again, not that I was looking for one.

And here are my most prized finds. Fourth most exciting sighting – feral horses in Theodore Roosevelt Park.

In third place, a somewhat mangy (and radio-collared) bighorn sheep along the side of the road.

Sweet number two is this tiny mule deer fawn. We’d just seen a doe running away from the road and didn’t think too much of it. Then we drove past something brown in the ditch. I told Hubby to slowly back up and there was the precious little baby. 

Number one best find. Driving on a dirt road in Custer State Park, a vehicle was stopped ahead of us, definitely looking at something. So, just like the first picture of the buffalo, I started snapping pictures of I didn’t know what. I did capture them, but it was too blurry when zoomed in.

We finally asked the people what they were looking at. And once they told us what we were looking for and where, I was able to zoom in my camera and capture the beauties.

 Never thought we’d see any elk. We also saw a muskrat the first day and a pheasant on another day. Oh, and Hubby reminded me that we saw vultures circling one day. But I'm not going to count the robins and other common birds we saw. 

That makes – what? – 16 different species? Not bad, not bad at all.