LeHardy Rapids on the Yellowstone River is one of the places we always visit between Jackson, Wyoming, and Gardiner, Montana.

The LeHardy’s Rapids are a cascade on the Yellowstone River, three miles north of Fishing Bridge. Geomorpholiogically, it is thought that this is the actual spot where the lake ends and the river continues its northward flow. In the spring, many cutthroat trout may be seen here, resting in the shallow pools before expending bursts of energy to leap up the rapids on their way to spawn under Fishing Bridge.

Yellowstone River, National Park Service website.

Harlequin Ducks

LeHardy Rapids is one of the places Harlequin Ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus) fly to in the spring on their west-east migration, and I first saw them here in 2022, and included a photo in my article on that trip. This year I was surprised at the number of fellow photographers at the site also taking photos of these colorful ducks.

I captured some video of the location as well as the mating season behavior of the Harlequin Ducks—on our prior visit, these ducks mainly had been sleeping quietly on rocks in the white water.

In the winter, we have seen Harlequin Ducks at South Jetty, Newport, Oregon, as I wrote in a previous article and as described in The Birds of Oregon: A General Reference. In addition, the Birds of the World website (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) describes their wintering grounds to be the Strait of Georgia (in the Salish Sea between southeast British Columbia and Vancouver Island). It sounds like Harlequin Ducks winter in several locations on the west coast.

On West Coast of North America, most birds migrate east on spring migration, but can move in any direction, including south (e.g., birds wintering in British Columbia and breeding on Olympic Peninsula, WA). Reverse for fall migrants. Birds breeding in various sites in Alberta, Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Oregon all winter in Strait of Georgia

Robertson, G. J. and R. I. Goudie (2020). Harlequin Duck (Histrionicus histrionicus), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (S. M. Billerman, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.harduc.01

American Dippers

American Dippers (Cinclus mexicanus) also inhabit LeHardy Rapids. I have written about Dippers at LeHardy Rapids and the Metolius River in a previous article.

Bison

At the LeHardy Rapids parking area, along the Grand Loop Road, we saw a herd of bison walking slowly along, stopping traffic—known as a ‘bison jam.’ Hideko captured the scene.

I had my long, fixed-focal-length lens on my camera, so I made the only photo I could, a portrait, from the same safe distance.