After Kate got the spotting scope, we went to Hayden Valley to watch wolves around 8 am. We never saw any, so we went on to do other things. We wanted to see the wolves with Kate’s spotting scope and John’s 800mm lens before we left.

The weather forecast was good for today, so we planned to get up at 5:30 am. We snoozed once, and we got up at 5:40 am. We still made it to the wolf watching spot at about 7:00 am. Some normal people (and an annoying child that would not go away), said they thought they saw three wolves. John had some trouble with auto-focus, so they looked like rocks at first. He referenced the picture from the 400mm lens, and there were no rocks there. After some manual focus adjustments, all the rocks turned out to be wolves.

Originally, we thought there was one wolf, then two, then three, then we realized that the point on the horizon was an ear. Eventually, we realized that there were seven adult wolves and between one and three pups. For the first hour, they were largely just sleeping on the hill.

This is the view of the camera without digital zoom. You can see grey and black specks, but it is still better than the 400mm lens. (Click here to zoom, but you will have to go back to this page.)

The family in the rental RV parked next to us turned out to be from the Netherlands. We talked to them for a little bit, and his lens only zoomed to 600mm. He said it was his last morning at the park, and he was hoping to see the wolves. Kate and John let him and his wife look through the scope and camera to see the wolves and pup. We let a few other people take a look too. Kate lets kids look through the scope; John will not let kids near his camera.

Around 9 am, the pack started milling around and howling, but you could not hear them over the yammering people watching.

All the video is from Kate’s iPhone and spotting scope. The spotting scope has 75x optical magnification. The spotting scope lens quality may not be the best, but the camera with the 800mm lens only has 16x magnification. The camera photos can be digitally zoomed by cropping photos to get 80x-160x magnification, but the quality suffers. The camera videos are lower resolution, and videos can not be as easily zoomed and cropped.