Winter’s prime season for spotting animals in Yosemite National Park. Use one of our
Scenic Wonders vacation cabins as your home base for a personal Sierra Nevada safari!
And remember, if you do see an
animal or identify its tracks in Yosemite, the park has a Wildlife Observation Card you can fill out and submit to any visitor center or entrance station. Your sighting can offer useful information for park staff about resident fauna.
Spotting Winter Wildlife
While you’re out in about in Yosemite’s snowbound wonderland, you’ve got a good chance of spotting
wildlife such as black-tailed deer, common ravens, Steller jays, Douglas squirrels, chickadees, and coyotes. If you’re
snowshoeing the backcountry, you might be lucky enough to see more retiring creatures such as snowshoe hares and northern goshawks. Quiet hours spent along streams and rivers sometimes yield observations of dippers, mink, or river otters.
Dawn and dusk are the ideal critter-spotting hours, but keep your eyes peeled any time of day: You never know what you might spot!
Wildlife Tracking
Above the snow line, tracking wildlife offers one of Yosemite’s most exciting and engrossing winter pastimes. Crusted, glazed-over snow can be a difficult medium to read for beginner trackers, but fresh-fallen drifts are often peppered with clear footprints you can identify with the help of a good field guide and plenty of practice.
Good tracking references include Mark Elbroch, et al.’s
Field Guide to Animal Tracks and Scat of California and Olaus Murie’s
A Field Guide to Animal Tracks.
Scouring Yosemite for animal tracks, you have the opportunity to discover sign left by truly elusive wildlife that’s difficult to actually glimpse in the flesh. For example, up in the montane conifer forests you may stumble across trails left by such rarely seen phantoms as puma, fisher, Sierra Nevada red fox—maybe even a wolverine! That huge weasel has been documented in the Sierra recently, but scientists don’t know whether any currently roam Yosemite.
Another plus of tracking is you get to also enjoy a fun-filled afternoon of snowshoeing or
cross-country skiing while you’re at it!
Scenic Wonders Wildlife-watching
Don’t forget that your vacation backyard in the
Yosemite West Scenic Wonders neighborhood provides plenty of its own wildlife-watching opportunities. You’ll often run into the tracks of deer, coyotes, and squirrels in the local mixed-conifer woods—and, not uncommonly, spot their makers out and about!
