When you visit national parks, do you find yourself focusing on a particular aspect of those parks? Maybe you are concentrating your photography on cactus blooms, or wildflowers, or the results of glacial geology, or a particular specimen of wildlife. What you are doing, in fact, is creating a theme to your national park photographic story. Photographer Rebecca Latson discusses themes and how they can improve your powers of observation as well as your photographic skills.

Last month we pointed to some of the frustrations that can be had when trying to navigate the overall NPS.gov domain. Let's now take a look at the individual haves and have-nots of the National Park System and some of the things that differentiate them.

A black bear that refused to be driven out of the Lake McDonald Lodge complex at Glacier National Park in Montana was put down by rangers after breaking into a cabin and trying to get into other buildings.

A carefully planned effort to boost the bison herd at the Oakland Zoo in California with animals from the Blackfeet Nation adjacent to Glacier National Park has proved unexpectedly successful, and now most of the bison loaned to the zoo have been sent back to the reservation.