Papillon Photos: Road Trips and Wildlife

Today, I am bringing you a short tale of road trips and wildlife.

What?  Are those words even related in some sense?

Ok, fine.  I have to admit the purposes of road trips are not necessarily related to the members of the animal kingdom. That is why we have zoos. Right?

I understand that on a road trip you are expecting to drive thru a road like this (see below).

Road in Utah

Or you may feel excited about participating on some fun activities.  Kayaking anyone?

Lake area in Utah

 

However, you can’t deny that travel always bring us surprises.  And road trips, being a form of travel on steroids, have the power to put us face to face with unexpected encounters.

I have already written about the road trip my husband made the second week of June.  I posted his photos of the Gran Canyon’s North Rim and Zion National Park a few weeks ago.

These are extremely amazing places and I was shocked (in a good way) when I took a look at the pictures. The drop dead beauty of those parks left me speechless.

When going thru the photos, I started to notice a lot of wildlife pictures.  Being a sucker for animal encounters (except snakes), I exclaimed the words (or onomatopoeian expressions) ohh and ahh more than a 100 times per minute.

As I said before, I didn’t go on the road trip because of work obligations.  I asked my husband: “Are you telling me I did not only missed the parks but the animals too?  His sad answer was this: “Yes, you missed all the animals we saw”.  The he proceeded to give me details about the how nice was seeing deer jumping with joy all around.  Arrghhh.  Not nice.

But seriously, the number (and variety) of animals encounter on the road was amazing.

Take a look at what they saw:

Tons and tons of deer.  They were everywhere.  Their jumps delighted humans getting into their environments. 

Deer hiding behind trees, Utah

Deer running away

Deer hanging around

Not sure if this one is a deer

Chipmunks.  These live around hot areas.  Sometimes you see them around when the temperature is higher than 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Chipmunk

Birds. This one is adorable.

Bird

There were also bison!!  And to make it even cooler, their babies were around.  After taking a close look at these furry, four legged friends, I am not complaining anymore about bad hair days.

Bisons eating lunch

Bisons and babies

I am not sure what these ostriches were doing in this territory but for some reason they were there.   They do not qualify as wildlife (or they do?) but definitely a nice sight.

Ostriches, not exactly wildlife but interesting

In my opinion, the most interesting sight was the following.  Take a look at the photo below.  Look closer.  What do you see?

Do you see something up there?

 

Here is a better closeup of the critter in the nest. It’s an eagle chick!! The photo is not that good because the baby was pretty high up.  The camera has only a 20x optical zoom.  To take the photo, the digital zoom was used (which makes the picture grainy).

The guys were lucky and caught the little eagle on the nest.  I am telling you, it is amazing what you can found on road trips.

It's a little eagle (or hawk) up there!!

Well, it is time to say goodbye because I told you this was going to be a short story. Just remember the following.  If you are going on a road trip, keeps your eyes wide open.  You never know what you can find.