Animals & Plants of Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
The 40 animals, plants, and fungi you can find at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, with sizes, diets, and whether you should worry. See the full park guide at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison is a narrow river gorge cut into dark gneiss, with walls so close that the sun reaches the river only a few hours a day. Golden eagles nest on the ledges, bighorn sheep pick across the cliffs, and mule deer and elk browse the oak and pinyon on top. Common collared lizards flash between the talus below.
Common questions
Which Black Canyon animals should a family give space to?
At Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, give space to Mountain lion, Elk, Bighorn sheep, Coyote, and Mule deer. Mountain lion: Confrontations are very rare — even in Yellowstone, with a healthy population, few have ever been documented. Elk: Elk look calm but they are large and wild. Bighorn sheep: Bighorn sheep are shy and would rather climb away than come near you. Coyote: Coyotes almost always run from people. Mule deer: Mule deer look calm and tame, but they are wild animals with sharp hooves, and bucks have antlers in fall. (per NPS species pages).
What do the cliff and canyon residents of Black Canyon eat?
At Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the most interesting eaters are Mountain lion, Bald eagle, Golden eagle, and Clark's nutcracker. Mountain lion eats elk, deer, marmots, porcupines. Bald eagle eats fish, ducks, gulls, small mammals, carrion. Golden eagle eats rabbits, hares, ground squirrels, marmots, ptarmigan. Clark's nutcracker eats pine seeds, whitebark pine seeds, insects, berries, small animals. (per NPS species pages).
Which Black Canyon species carries the strangest true fact?
The strangest true thing about Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park: Utah juniper: Pinyon-juniper woodland is the predominant plant community at Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Utah juniper also grows in scattered patches along the river at the canyon bottom. Mountain lion: Cougar kittens weigh about a pound at birth and gain roughly a pound a week for their first eight to ten weeks. (per NPS species pages).
Anything here that bites?
Keep away
- American badger: Badgers would rather dig away than fight and avoid people entirely.
- Bighorn sheep: Bighorn sheep are shy and would rather climb away than come near you.
- Coyote: Coyotes almost always run from people.
- Elk: Elk look calm but they are large and wild.
- Mountain lion: Confrontations are very rare — even in Yellowstone, with a healthy population, few have ever been documented.
- Mule deer: Mule deer look calm and tame, but they are wild animals with sharp hooves, and bucks have antlers in fall.
Don't touch or eat
- American pasqueflower: Every part of this plant is poisonous to eat, and the fresh sap can blister skin.
- Claret cup cactus: This cactus is covered in stiff spines, so the rule is look, do not touch.
- North American porcupine: A porcupine cannot throw or shoot its quills, but they detach the instant something touches them, and the barbed tips work deeper into skin over time.
Bites if handled
- Bald eagle: A bald eagle will not come after you.
- Common collared lizard: This lizard is not dangerous.
- Golden eagle: A golden eagle will not come after a person.
- Golden-mantled ground squirrel: None.
- Great horned owl: This owl hunts small animals at night and will not come after you.
- Little brown bat: Very low risk.
- Peregrine falcon: None to worry about.
- Plateau fence lizard: No venom, and harmless if left alone.
- Red-tailed hawk: None.
- Sagebrush lizard: This lizard has no venom, and its main defense is running.
- Sandhill crane: A sandhill crane is big but shy and will usually walk away from people.
- Townsend's big-eared bat: Bats are not out to hurt you, and they are not 'flying mice' or blind.
- Turkey vulture: None directly — it eats only dead animals and avoids people.
- Western terrestrial garter snake: Essentially harmless.
Everything else on this page is harmless. What each group means.
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Mammal American badger
Taxidea taxus
A short, wide-bodied digger with a white-striped face, common on the grasslands of Yellowstone and Badlands, that can vanish underground in minutes.
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Bird American dipper
Cinclus mexicanus
A stream-gray songbird that walks along the bottom of cold mountain creeks to hunt, the only songbird in North America that does.
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Plant American pasqueflower
Pulsatilla patens ssp. multifida
A furry, purple-blue prairie flower that beats the grass out of the ground each spring, blooming before almost anything else is green.
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Bird Bald eagle
Haliaeetus leucocephalus
The white-headed fish hawk that is the national bird of the United States, common along the lakes of Voyageurs and the coasts of Olympic and Katmai.
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Plant Big sagebrush
Artemisia tridentata
The silver-leaved, sharp-smelling evergreen shrub of the high desert West, and the main food of the greater sage-grouse nearly all year.
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Mammal Bighorn sheep
Ovis canadensis
A wild sheep of cliffs and canyons, where rams carry heavy curled horns and both sexes cross steep rock other animals can't.
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Bird Black-billed magpie
Pica hudsonia
A black-and-white corvid with a tail as long as its body, common on fences and roadsides across the northern Rockies and Great Plains.
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Plant Claret cup cactus
Echinocereus triglochidiatus
A low, mounding desert cactus that bursts into bright red, cup-shaped flowers each spring at Arches, Canyonlands, and Big Bend.
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Bird Clark's nutcracker
Nucifraga columbiana
A pale-gray, black-winged cousin of the crow that hides tens of thousands of pine seeds each fall and remembers where to find them again.
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Reptile Common collared lizard
Crotaphytus collaris
A bright, big-headed lizard with two black neck bands that can sprint on its back legs like a tiny dinosaur across the slickrock at Arches and Canyonlands.
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Bird Common raven
Corvus corax
A big, glossy-black problem-solver that rolls and tumbles over the cliffs of Grand Canyon, Arches, and the desert parks, watching for its next meal.
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Mammal Coyote
Canis latrans
The wild dog you're most likely to hear at a national park — a coyote, at home in the desert, the mountains, and the edges of towns.
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Plant Douglas-fir
Pseudotsuga menziesii
One of the tallest trees on Earth, not actually a true fir, whose cones carry little three-pointed flaps a Native story calls the tails and legs of hiding mice.
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Mammal Elk
Cervus canadensis
A large deer of mountain meadows whose bulls grow branching antlers and, each fall, bugle a high whistling call across the valley.
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Bird Golden eagle
Aquila chrysaetos
A dark brown eagle with golden neck feathers that hunts rabbits and hares across open country, nesting on cliffs in Denali, Death Valley, and Great Basin.
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Mammal Golden-mantled ground squirrel
Callospermophilus lateralis
A chipmunk-lookalike ground squirrel with a reddish-gold head and shoulders and no face stripes, common on rocks and trailsides from Glacier to Mesa Verde.
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Bird Great horned owl
Bubo virginianus
A big night hunter with feathery "horns" and a deep hoot, found from the saguaro desert to the Everglades, hunting after dark on silent wings.
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Bird Killdeer
Charadrius vociferus
A shorebird that lives nowhere near a shore. At Badlands we never saw one. We heard it call its own name across the campground.
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Mammal Little brown bat
Myotis lucifugus
A tiny brown flyer that hunts insects over water at dusk and sleeps in caves and barns, eating half its own weight in bugs each night.
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Bird Mountain bluebird
Sialia currucoides
A sky-blue thrush of high, open country, the only bluebird seen regularly above 5,000 feet, nesting in lava-rock crevices at Craters of the Moon.
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Mammal Mountain lion
Puma concolor
A tan, solitary big cat found from Glacier to Mesa Verde, called cougar, puma, or panther by region, and rarely seen at all.
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Mammal Mule deer
Odocoileus hemionus
A western deer named for its big mule-like ears, common along canyon rims and desert washes in Grand Canyon, Zion, Yosemite, and Saguaro.
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Mammal North American porcupine
Erethizon dorsatum
A slow, quill-covered rodent that climbs into the treetops at Theodore Roosevelt to eat twigs, and North America's second-largest rodent after the beaver.
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Bird Peregrine falcon
Falco peregrinus
The fastest animal alive, a crow-sized falcon that folds its wings and stoops on other birds in midair, and a species that nearly vanished before recovering.
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Bird Pinyon jay
Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus
A dusty-blue crow relative that travels Mesa Verde and Black Canyon in loud flocks, burying pine seeds it will dig up again later.
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Reptile Plateau fence lizard
Sceloporus tristichus
A gray-brown lizard with blue belly patches on the males, sharing sunny rock at Mesa Verde and Black Canyon with the flashier collared lizard.
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Plant Ponderosa pine
Pinus ponderosa
A tall western pine whose sun-warmed bark smells like butterscotch and vanilla, and which drops its low branches so ground fire can pass safely beneath it.
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Plant Quaking aspen
Populus tremuloides
A white-barked mountain tree whose flat-stemmed leaves shiver in the lightest breeze, turning whole hillsides gold each fall.
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Bird Red-tailed hawk
Buteo jamaicensis
The hawk most often recorded in Yellowstone. We watched a hawk take a pika near the Roosevelt cabins and could not tell you which hawk it was.
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Bird Rufous hummingbird
Selasphorus rufus
A copper-orange hummingbird that flies farther, relative to its size, than almost any other bird on Earth, from Mexico to Alaska and back every year.
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Reptile Sagebrush lizard
Sceloporus graciosus
A small, slender, high-country lizard, the fence lizard's cousin, whose males flash blue belly and throat patches in a push-up display.
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Bird Sandhill crane
Antigone canadensis
A tall gray wading bird with a red forehead and a bugling call, gathering by the thousands near Great Sand Dunes and standing year-round in the Everglades.
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Bird Steller's jay
Cyanocitta stelleri
A deep-blue mountain jay with a black crest and a loud voice, the campground bird that will eye your sandwich at Yosemite, Sequoia, and Crater Lake.
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Mammal Townsend's big-eared bat
Corynorhinus townsendii
A soft brown bat with enormous curling ears that roosts in the cool lava-tube caves of Lava Beds and hunts moths in the dark.
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Bird Turkey vulture
Cathartes aura
A large, dark soaring bird with a bare red head, circling on thermals over open country, using one of the sharpest noses of any bird.
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Plant Two-needle pinyon
Pinus edulis
A short, gnarled pine of the drier Southwest, growing at Mesa Verde, Black Canyon, and Great Sand Dunes, with nuts a jay plants by forgetting them.
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Plant Utah juniper
Juniperus osteosperma
A short, twisted evergreen of dry canyon country, rooting in cracked rock at Mesa Verde, Black Canyon, and the Craters of the Moon lava fields.
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Bird Western meadowlark
Sturnella neglecta
A grassland songbird with a yellow throat and a black V on its chest, the state bird of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.
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Reptile Western terrestrial garter snake
Thamnophis elegans
A slim, striped snake found from stream banks to talus slopes across ten of these parks, and the most commonly seen reptile in several of them.
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Plant Western wheatgrass
Pascopyrum smithii
A blue-green prairie grass whose underground rhizomes weave a tough sod — the official state grass of North and South Dakota.