The geysers and the grizzlies of Yellowstone

To help you to enjoy the "Call of the wild" travel article in the August Spotlight, we've collected five fascinating links about Yellowstone National Park.

1. "A picture is worth a thousand words." That's a cliché, of course, but on flickr, the image-hosting website and community platform, the cliché works well. Of the 3.6 billion images that flickr says it now hosts, some of the most beautiful are the photos of Yellowstone National Park.

2. Get there before it blows up! Our planet's dynamic forces — erupting geysers and sulphurous fields of bubbling mud — can all be experienced by the visitor to Yellowstone. Last year, the park recorded 400 mini-earthquakes in an eight-day period, leading to talk of a coming super-volcano explosion. National Geographic has created an interactive site about what's going on underground: When Yellowstone Explodes.

3. What are those big teeth for? Yellowstone's biology is as fascinating as its geology, as author Joel Berger shows in The Better to Eat You With. Bison and moose can survive only by keeping a careful eye on the park's predators, but the Yellowstone predator-prey system keeps changing, as when wolves are reintroduced after 60 years, or when grizzly bears learn how to use man-made roads. There's a preview of Berger's extraordinary effort to understand animal fear at Google Books.

4. The horrible death of Timothy Treadwell. The grizzly bear (Ursus horribilis) is one of America's most legendary animals. By 1975, however, because of the destruction of much of their habitat, only 200 grizzlies survived in Yellowstone. But thanks to the Endangered Species Act, their numbers have increased to more than 600. The last time a grizzly killed a visitor to Yellowstone was in 1986, but you should be very careful around these creatures, as film-maker Werner Herzog pointed out in Grizzly Man.

5. Old Faithful Live! Watch it on the Old Faithful Geyser Live-Streaming Video WebCam, which requires the free Windows Media Player, by the way. The park authorities promise that "When bison, elk, coyotes, or the occasional bear wander into the camera's view, live video images will be transmitted." The site also offers an Old Faithful tour, an introduction to geysers and how they work, panoramas of the Old Faithful area and a history of the world's most famous geyser.