Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.

~Mae West

I’m starting to experiment with the slow motion video feature on my Canon R5. Slow motion video on this camera has no sound which is both a good and bad thing depending on the situation. I’ve taken several videos of a few different species and find that it is interesting to see details of what they are doing that my eye alone sometimes misses. I’ve also discovered it can be a very long video clip if the animal isn’t doing anything particularly noteworthy. So, here are a couple of clips that may fall somewhere in between those two criteria (viedos are best viewed full screen).

One afternoon I crawled down near the Lamar River as a group of Barrow’s goldeneyes were diving to feed (they primarily eat aquatic invertebrates). They typically stay underwater for less than 30 seconds and this section of the river is fairly shallow so it may even be less here. They moved back and forth across the river as a group until another person came over to the edge of the road near me and the birds slowly moved away.

–A group of Barrow’s goldeneyes diving for food in the Lamar River

Their feeding behavior is like a graceful dance with water droplets and the splashes behind them adding to the beauty.

This next clip was taken along the Old Yellowstone Trail, a dirt road that parallels the main highway into Gardiner on the other side of the river. It is a great place to see pronghorn, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep, especially in winter. Any time I take trash out to the dump I always drive a few extra miles and cross over the river to take this road back to town. You just never know what you might see. On this particular trip, I pulled over to watch several pronghorn feeding on the very short grass out on the flats next to the road. To my surprise, a few of these elegant animals decided to walk towards my truck and start browsing on a row of sagebrush shrubs less than 20 feet from where I was parked. I took some video at the normal rate and their feeding action is quite rapid with many pulls at the shrub in quick succession before pausing to chew their cud. Slowed down, you can see how precise this doe is in pulling the tips of the branches. And then you get that long pause while she chews on it for a bit while keeping a pair of huge wary eyes on this thing huddled in a huge chunk of metal near her dining room.

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–A female pronghorn looking at me with those incredible eyes while she browses on some sagebrush

Looking forward to filming additional behaviors (hopefully a bit more action-oriented) in slow motion as spring and summer bring new life to the landscape of Yellowstone.