Bison and Badlands

If you know where to look, if you know where to be, late July offers one of the most explosive and heart stopping wildlife photography opportunities in all of North America. The bison rut kicks off the annual cycle of tournaments each year and it just so happens to be the one with the most drama. From the bellows that sound like something from a horror movie to the metric tons of dust kicked into the air signaling dominance and daring would be challengers, the bison rut isn’t just something you watch, it’s something you experience. It’s something you feel on a visceral level.

If you have never had the opportunity to witness the peak of the bison rut before, then you are missing out on one of the most amazing wildlife events on this continent.

But bison are just the focal point.

This landscape also plays home to wild horses who are donning battle scars and tangled manes from their own tournaments as they fight for the right to pass on their legacy to posterity. One of the few wild populations recognized to be their own unique breed, these horses are known as the Nokota Horse. Thought to have descended from the horses surrendered by Sitting Bull's band of Hunkpapa Lakota at Fort Buford, these wild equines add an almost haunting beauty to the landscape as they drift in and out of the buttes and badlands like ghosts traveling across this landscape.

And then there’s the dog towns.

Seemingly endless prairie dog towns stretch out across the valleys here. The black-tailed prairie dog is an ecosystem engineer similar to beavers but on an order of magnitude that can be difficult to truly appreciate. Their presence lures in badgers, weasels, coyotes, foxes, and even bobcats all in search of easy meals. Meanwhile burrowing owls nest in the middle of it all and countless species of other birds come from all across the prairie drawn to the hustle and bustle of the dog towns in search of insects.

Dog towns are a wildlife photographer’s dream come true. Endless activity, pulling in every big herbivore, carnivore, and raptor from miles around onto the same small piece of real estate.

The prairies and badlands we will spend a week exploring are perhaps one of the best kept secrets in the national park system. While the summer hordes of tourists and photographers crawl across every square inch of places like Yellowstone National Park in July, Theodore Roosevelt National Park is one of the least visited in the United States. And that’s a good thing for us because it allows us to work in almost total isolation with a diversity of wildlife that’s hard to find anywhere else.