Badlands

Mild weather, needing erosion pictures for a class I'm teaching, and Polar Vortex induced cabin fever sent me to the Badlands yesterday. That and a vague worry about the how the park, particularly the bison, fared during the shutdown.

To set your mind at ease, the park looked in fine condition. The campground was not vandalized in anyway that I could see. The bison, the few that I saw, looked good. Plump. Relaxed.

Lounging in the sun on a warm winter day.

I had hoped to get a lot of close ups of the bison as this was my first spin in the park with my new camera but other than this pair basking in the sun by the side of the road the bison were all far afield, visible only as tiny bison dots through my binoculars. Perhaps a super high end digital single lens reflex camera, the kind with a two foot lens, might have gotten a good picture but I was pretty sure this was beyond what my little camera could handle.

No matter. There were plenty of things to photograph.

Like this.

This caught my eye as I was driving so much so I turned around to have a second look. The contrast of the fresh wood with the black bark was striking. What was this?

I got out of the car and inspected the tree from the shoulder of the road. Getting up close would have meant clambering down a steep, brushy hill. I have learned that when something catches your eye to do a slow visual sweep of the area to see what else is going on which is how I found a similarly marked tree across the road. This tree required no clambering to get up close.

I noted the following: that the bare wood had teeth marks and the tree was an elm. (Again with the elms! This time in the Badlands!)

Teeth marks and fresh wood.

My conclusion: a porcupine had been dining on this bark.

I have seen porcupine in this area of the park before. If I had been so inclined to do some bushwacking (I wasn't) I probably could have found it in that copse where the tree originally caught my attention.

While wandering around in that area, I also found Lakota prayer ties, not surprising since the Badlands juxtaposes and lies within the Pine Ridge Reservation. The ties were worn; the black had faded to gray, the red to pink, the yellow and white almost indistinguishable from each other. I wonder who stopped to pray there and hope that, whoever it was, had their prayers answered.