I like that the primary diagonal created by the coyote tracks goes through the more subtle horizontal lines in the snow. Without your description, I'd not have know what the coyote was. That's probably a good thing because it engages the mind as well as the eye.
This is very cool. I think the coyote needs to be bigger to have more impact. Another possibility might be to remove it and have the viewer make up there own story about the tracks.
This is a great point of view showing the meandering animal tracks in the snow. It also shows to us a featureless surface, but to animals there obviously is information they can sense. Without reading your text, I wondered what the animal was. I like Jackie's idea of no animal. The tracks alone tell a story, and the lines alone make an interesting graphic. On the other hand, the small looking animal gives a sense of scale to the image, showing the vastness of the scene.
It really shows how hard coyotes have to work to get a meal, I agree the coyote could be a bit bigger, at first I thought it was a mouse until I zoomed in, but I think you were going for how much traveling the animal had to do to get a meal. I wish we had a spot locally where a person could photograph something like this. Guess that's what happens when you live in flatland.
Thanks much for your comments. The size... this is at 165mm of a 70-200 (12mp image cropped to 8mp), not many pixels on the coyote (about 30x50 pixels). Survival in Yellowstone in the winter... it's amazing the number of animals there are, but still dwarfed by the expanse of white.
Cheers,
-Michael-
(Jonesing for another Yellowstone trip in winter).