We made a Thanksgiving drive to Illinois, and on long drives I always want to stop at interesting places along the way so we aren't just going from hotel to hotel. The first stop was Badlands National Park where we saw a couple of large mule deer bucks with antlers. We also saw a herd of six bighorns, including a ram. The Badlands is now putting tracking collars on rams. You can give me all the reasons in the world why they do it, and I still find it repulsive.

After our Thanksgiving visit, we made a detour to the south to Loess Bluffs National Wildlife refuge in northwest Missouri. I used to go every year around the first week in December, but now that we live in Montana I haven't been there since 2021. As expected, there were large numbers of eagles, but I think the snow goose numbers may have been down a bit. The official numbers from Dec. 3 were 172,301 ducks, 41,250 snow geese, 2,688 trumpeter swans, and 373 eagles. Depending on when you are there, there can be half a million snow geese, or there can be none.

These are the first decent eagle images I've posted in more than two years. I saw some eagles in Maine two months ago and posted one (bad) image.

Something new for me at Loess Bluffs was a coyote patrolling the pond, and I happened to see him find a large dead bird. It was a dark color so it wasn't a snow goose. Maybe it was a Canada goose.

On the way home we drove through the Badlands again, and again I saw a mule deer with large antlers, but the images from the earlier visit are better and those are the ones posted.

Loess Bluffs eagle

Coyote with a prize

Badlands mule deer