One of my favorite things about being outside is seeing all of the animals. Here are some of the wild animals we saw while visiting the Grand Canyon National Park.

I’ll start with the squirrels because we saw so many of them. We saw 3 different species of squirrels.

Abert’s squirrel (we didn’t get a picture of one of these, but this is what they look like),

Golden mantled squirrel (we saw these everywhere!),

and  the common tree squirrel. There were signs all over warning about how dangerous the squirrels are. They have fleas that carry the plague and the squirrels are known to bite. The squirrel bite can get infected fast. One of the Rangers told us that out of all of the animals at GCNP, squirrels are the most dangerous because they beg for food or water and will sometimes bite.

The squirrels at GCNP are NOT afraid of humans. You can see how close the squirrel in the picture above gets to a group of humans.

Outside of the Grand Canyon Market Place we saw a herd of elk munching on the grass and leaves scattered through the trees. When it is hunting season, the elk go to Grand Canyon NP for shelter because hunting is not allowed at the National Park.

We saw about 7 females and 1 male at the market place. One of the female elk was on the sidewalk close to us, on our side of the fence. She was just walking and eating grass and leaves and didn’t seem to mind the humans gathering to watch.

The male elk (buck) had one side of his antlers messed up. One side pointed downward and wasn’t as big as the other side.  We saw a lot of elk at GCNP, but didn’t get to take pictures of the others.

When we walked the rim trail, we saw a tarantula with its front two legs disconnected from its body. The unattached legs were twitching on the ground.

On hermits Rest we saw a snake witch we believed was a baby California king snake in a hole on the side of a statue.

There were a ton of different kinds of birds at GCNP. We didn’t get pictures of very many of them. It’s hard to get a good picture of something that doesn’t hold still for long. My brother took the picture of the bird above.

Those are the animals we saw at Grand Canyon National Park, maybe we will find more down the road.