If you look closely, one is in the trees at the left (actually more but only one in view). I looked very closely.
I didn't see any of their smaller cousins, the deer, in the ravines as they've been in the past. But I had a happy surprise with the bison bison--that's their actual scientific name--known as the most numerous, famous Great Plains animal, allowing Native Americans self-sufficiency with food, clothing, and shelter, which is why the whites murdered them all, later substituting ecologically unsound cattle. Now ranchers like Ted Turner are trying to build up huge herds again of the so-called American buffalo (it isn't like the other world buffalos) found on our nickels and, with their leaner, healthier meat, in many supermarket freezers. They are still venerated by Native Americans, especially this calf, which seems to be a ghost calf, the very sacred white buffalo.
How can I know that? Because an ordinary reddish-brown calf is with the rest of the herd, seen here at the left, lying near the service road.
Close to the bison were the pronghorns, another American misnomer in that they are called antelopes or goats but are neither, another fossil animal of our continent from millions of years. Our fastest North American animal at 50-60 mph, the pronghorn is capable of 30-40 over long distances, though I hadn't known only the cheetah was faster in the world (but lacks the pronghorn's long-distance stamina). According to a biological website, they're "the only animal in the world with branched horns (not antlers) and the only animal in the world to shed its horns, as if they were antlers." Dad and my brother-in-law called them "goats" when they went to western Nebraska or Wyoming to hunt them. I'm totally familiar with these animal racecars from covering Wyoming thoroughly and seeing them in other Great Plains/Rocky Mountain states. Usually very wary, they raced off from any closeness--they're lousy jumpers, by the way, having to go under fences rather than over--until one very memorable time south of Casper on 487 when one stood in the middle of the asphalt staring me down, refusing to budge even when I had stopped, astonished, and honked the horn. Nor did he dash off but simply regally strolled away and stood in the ditch gazing calmly at me. (Somewhere I have his photo.) The pair below were necking, literally, just before I took their picture.
Now to end with one of the caged creatures up in the circular enclosure by the visitors center, one of the most famous of literary animals from Aesop forward to Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen opera I watched two days ago, from mythology and Walt Disney to a network, the very symbol of sly cunning, the smallest of the dog or Canidae family I have always favored, another urban invader whom I have happily discovered here on my walks, including a pair with a family one time in a burrow on the Little Papio, flashes of bushy-tailed red fur. I liked this one snoozing in the autumn sunshine.
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