I have heard for a decade how one of the best ways to see and photograph the charismatic but elusive Dall Sheep is on the stretch of highway between Anchorage and Soldotna... But somehow, despite having driven the road at least 20 times the best I'd done is some distance glimpses. So I began to suspect that this was another case of wishful thinking by the locals. But I stuck with it and yesterday, sure enough, there was a family of three sheep right near the road. They were not at all shy and even with several vehicles full of people stopping and various photographers peering at them they grazed contentedly.
In a situation like that the key is to think about getting interesting shots. As nice as it is to have images of a hard to photograph animal like a Dall Sheep, an image showing the shoulder of the road or the road itself and other cars isn't going to look very appealing. So after moving around to where I got the angle of the sun the way I wanted I looked for some backgrounds that would provide the image with a natural setting. Fortunately the young sheep was sometimes taking time out from eating to scramble up and down part of the nearly sheer cliff face. I had my vertical grip on my D700 so I had plenty of burst speed to capture the action. I put my 1.7x TC on my 70-200 so I'd have enough reach with a light enough rig to hand hold easily and then waited for the action to unfold.
I was rewarded with many shots like the one attached to this post. It was an awesome way to spend an hour of what is otherwise quite a long drive from Homer to Anchorage. For the most part everyone at the sighting was well behaved but there were two disquieting behaviors worth commenting on. The first and most dangerous was that some vehicles stopped on the side of the road with no shoulder (it is a 2-lane highway there and one side has a guard rail protecting vehicles from falling into the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet) partially blocking the flow of traffic on a 65mph highway. This is dangerous for them, for the oncoming traffic, and even for those of us on the other side of the road (which had plenty of room, probably 20 yards of gravel between the roadbed and the rocks) since if someone had to swerve to avoid them there is no telling where they might have wound up. Common sense should dictate that no matter how exciting the animal, it's prudent to proceed to a safe place to either turn around someplace safe and come back so you can use the wide shoulder or somehow get off the road before stopping to watch.
The other behavior, while not dangerous to us, was almost equally irksome. Despite the sheep being just about as cooperative as possible, two men (both with Nikon long lenses I hate to say) felt the need to click, whistle and play with the gravel to try to attact the attention of the grazing male. Thankfully the tactic didn't seem to bother the sheep--and in fact it didn't cause him to look up so they eventually got bored and left. At one point it looked like they were going to toss gravel and I was prepared to say something, but it didn't get that far. When there are as many as 20 or 30 people all watching a mammal feed if they start treating it like a trained pet and whistling, clicking and interfering with its natural behavior it isn't going to be good for the animal or in the long run for future sightseers or photographers as the animals will just stay further away. It's not that hard to respect their needs and behaviors. There were still plenty of great photographs to be had and of course with enough patience eventually the grazing sheep do look up!