Now this is inter­est­ing behav­ior. I’ve seen it a cou­ple of times now, and while this isn’t an inter­est­ing photo in and of itself, it might be inter­est­ing sci­en­tif­i­cally. Those are three mag­pies all walk­ing around on the elk, pick­ing at–not sure what. Various par­a­sites? Hard to believe par­a­sites can live at this alti­tude, but I imag­ine they do on the nice warm blood of elks.

So is their a com­mu­nal rela­tion­ship between mag­pies and elks? I’ve not seen behav­ior like this out­side of Africa. Fascinating. I really need to see if anyone’s done a paper about this.