Rehi all! Sorry to have been away, but we've been freezing our asses off in Wyoming this last little bit:

Anyhow, we were starting to question whether Luna was actually a male, partly due to her smallish size for a female (1400g) but mostly due to her general male-ish lack of aggression. She fits right into that large male / small female range and the only way to know for sure is to either see an egg laid or do a DNA test. Avian genetics can do this fairly cheaply on a blood or plucked feather sample --obtaining either of which on an awake ferrugi certainly counts as a "ballsy move" !

I'm sure you are familiar with the mammalian sex chromosome scheme of female = XX and male = XY. Well, birds are completely different. They evolved in parallel and have a ZW system, where the male is actually ZZ and the female is ZW, hence it's the female who donates the chromosome that determines the sex of the zygote. This system is also found in some fish, Komodo dragons, and most moths and butterflies.

At any rate, no she is indeed a female (ZW) and we can't blame her timidity around jackrabbits on her DNA

She has gotten hair twice now, so I think it's only a matter of time!

Beautiful country and beautiful animals. Except for the bear. That is scary. How close were you? Did you field dress the elk while it waited?

Nice pics!

We came upon a (very) fresh wolf kill there on the river, and by the afternoon that bear had already claimed it, with two smaller bears circling around in the background. We saw all of them multiple times at about 120 yds and as luck would have it, we parked the horses about 200yds downstream for our stalk up the mountain. The wind was downhill, but it was still a tense hour sitting nearby the elk waiting for the pack horse to come!

Great elk, but yikes.

That bear is dead serious!

RS

He had a reason to stay on his side of the river and we had a reason to stay on ours!

Informative post with fantastic photography, always happy to see a new one from you.

Which bird took the elk?