{"id":30964,"date":"2015-04-24T06:26:13","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T12:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=30964"},"modified":"2015-04-24T07:33:38","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T13:33:38","slug":"bison-at-the-scratchin-post-and-a-recycling-lesson-from-critters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/24\/bison-at-the-scratchin-post-and-a-recycling-lesson-from-critters\/","title":{"rendered":"Bison At The Scratchin’ Post (and a recycling lesson from critters)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t post bison photos\u00a0often but this big bull tickled my funny bone.<\/p>\n

Bison tend to do a lot of scratching but this time of year their\u00a0need for it increases because of higher temperatures, the return of the biting flies and the need to facilitate the\u00a0shedding of that thick winter coat.<\/p>\n

The problem\u00a0on\u00a0Antelope Island is the fact that trees are almost nonexistent so\u00a0there’s very\u00a0few natural vertical\u00a0projections for them to scratch against. There’s the occasional large boulder of the right size and shape\u00a0but that’s about it. The bison naturally gravitate toward road signs and informational signs in the state park for a little scratching\u00a0relief but when a brutish 2000 lb animal starts abusing one of those signs it quickly becomes toast so\u00a0the base of most of them has been covered with moderately sized rocks\u00a0to keep the bison at bay (bison don’t like to\u00a0walk on rocks).<\/p>\n

So when one of these behemoths encounters a sturdy vertical projection that it has access to it’s common for scratching to be taken to extremes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"bison<\/p>\n

That’s exactly what happened when this huge bull found a steel pipe hitching post for horses sticking out of the ground. It was sturdy, about the right height, there were no awkward rocks at its base and this guy apparently had multiple itches that needed attending to so he spent a long time at the post scratching. Many of his postures suggested to me that he was in bison heaven during the scratching process. I took over 200 photos of him at the post and I remember laughing out loud often as I watched him through my lens.<\/p>\n

Still pictures may not do justice to the humor I experienced as I watched\u00a0his gyrations\u00a0– maybe you had to be there…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"bison<\/p>\n

Think about it. How often does one see a bison with its head raised this high? I don’t believe I ever have. I didn’t even know they could DO that!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"bison<\/p>\n

He went through some pretty interesting contortions in order to reach spots that needed particular attention (that’s an ID tag behind his horn).<\/p>\n

These animals lose their winter hair in large clumps and then regularly dust bathe in wallows which accounts for his scraggly appearance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"bison<\/p>\n

This is my favorite photo of the bunch. With his coquettishly thrown head, (unusually) erect tail and fluffy pantaloons on his upper front legs he reminds me of a small toy dog at the Westminster Dog Show posing and performing for the\u00a0judges.<\/p>\n

Whenever I’m having a bad day in the future I think I’ll come back to this photo just to make me smile.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"bison<\/p>\n

I wish the photos gave you an accurate indication of just how serious this guy was about scratching. He’d work on one side for a while and then turn around and do the other. He alternated sides 6-8 times and I don’t even know how long he kept it up because he was already scratching at the post when I found him (I photographed him at the post for 9 minutes).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This time of year clumps of bison hair festoon the island. You find them on sage and rabbitbrush, on the ground, and stuck to structures the bison have used for scratching. Many bird species repurpose them as soft, insulating\u00a0nesting material.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"common<\/p>\n

I photographed this Common Raven on the island 11 days ago as it carried off a clump of bison hair, apparently to its nest.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

And a few years ago this Loggerhead Shrike was also using bison fur for its nest.<\/p>\n

Humans could learn some valuable lessons about recycling from critters.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t post bison photos often but this big bull tickled my funny bone.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,334,347,1531,346,395],"tags":[31,56,704,2062,61,2477,2478,1840],"class_list":["post-30964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-bison-mammals","category-common-ravens","category-loggerhead-shrikes-shrikes-and-vireos","category-miscellaneous","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-bison","tag-bison-fur","tag-bison-hair","tag-buffalo","tag-recycling","tag-repurposing","tag-scratching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/bison-6433-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-83q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}