Wyoming Nature Guide: December 2026
December is the heart of the Wyoming winter — short, cold days, deep snow on the ranges, and the National Elk Refuge at Jackson filling with thousands of wintering elk and Trumpeter Swans against the white. Yellowstone's wolves, bison, and otters stand out on the snow, and the long, dark, dry nights make for the clearest skies of the year.
What to look for this week
- Thousands of elk and Trumpeter Swans hold on the National Elk Refuge at Jackson, the signature Wyoming winter spectacle, with goldeneye on the open spring creeks.
- The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks in a short, sharp burst around January 3 — watch after midnight from a dark Red Desert pullout away from town lights.
- A planning week: order the ultra-short-season seed Wyoming's high valleys depend on before it sells out, and check stored potatoes and squash for rot.
Birds This Month
December birding in Wyoming is a winter affair of open water, feeders, and the wide cold basins, anchored by the spectacle of the National Elk Refuge at Jackson, where thousands of elk gather and Trumpeter Swans, Barrow's and common goldeneye, and mallards hold on the open spring creeks. Yellowstone in winter adds Bald and Golden Eagles, ravens, and trumpeter swans on the thermal-warmed rivers. Town and ranch feeders draw black-capped and mountain chickadees, red-breasted and pygmy nuthatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, house finches, Cassin's finches, and dark-eyed juncos.
The open country belongs to wintering raptors — Golden Eagles, Rough-legged Hawks, prairie falcons, and northern shrikes hunting the sage from poles and bush-tops, and Bald Eagles on every open stretch of the Snake, Green, and North Platte. In irruption years Bohemian Waxwings strip mountain-ash and juniper in the towns, and redpolls, Pine Grosbeaks, and gray-crowned rosy-finches drop to lower feeders. This is Christmas Bird Count season, when counts in Jackson, Cody, Casper, and elsewhere tally the winter avifauna.
This month's tip: join a local Christmas Bird Count, dress for serious cold, and keep feeders full and snow-free through the cold snaps — birds depend on them most when the temperature plunges below zero, and a heated birdbath offers open water nothing else can.
What's Blooming
Nothing blooms outdoors in a Wyoming December — the sagebrush steppe and the mountains lie frozen under deep, wind-packed snow, and the first sagebrush buttercup is three months off on the warmest foothills. The dormant high-desert landscape offers only its winter structure: the silver sweep of big sagebrush stretching across the basins, the curing plumes of native bunchgrasses bent under snow, the dried seed heads of lupine and blanketflower, the red stems of red-osier dogwood in the draws, the orange hips of wild rose, and the blue berry-like cones of Rocky Mountain juniper bright against the white. The plumed seed of western clematis still clings to the riparian thickets. Indoors, December is the heart of the forcing season — paperwhites and amaryllis in bloom on the windowsill, fragrant forced branches, and the holiday greenery of native juniper and pine bringing the only living color a deep-winter month allows.
Garden This Month
December gardening in Wyoming happens entirely at the kitchen table. The ground is frozen hard and snow-covered from Jackson Hole to the Powder River Basin, so this is the planning month: take stock of the past season, order seed early — especially the ultra-short-season and cold-hardy varieties a frost-any-month climate demands, which sell out fast — sketch next year's beds, and check stored potatoes, squash, and onions for any rot. It's also the time to plan windbreaks and structures, because in Wyoming's relentless wind a garden without shelter is scoured even under snow.
Leave the snow where it falls over perennial beds, strawberries, and fall garlic; at these elevations it is the single best insulation a garden gets, holding soil temperatures steady and shielding crowns from the violent freeze-thaw a midwinter Chinook brings to the eastern foothills. Knock heavy, wet snow gently off arborvitae and young conifers to prevent splitting and breakage, but leave the dry, fluffy snow in place to keep insulating. Tend the houseplants and forced bulbs, and dream over the catalogs through the year's longest nights.
Zone 3b (Jackson Hole, high valleys): the garden is buried in deep snow, your best insulation — leave the drifts banked over perennial crowns and cold frames. This is pure planning season: order the ultra-short-season seed Jackson gardens depend on early, before it sells out.
Zone 4a (high basins, Lander, Cody): fully dormant under snow and hard freeze — inventory seed, sharpen and oil tools, and confirm snow and mulch are protecting marginal perennials and fall-planted garlic through the cold and the freeze-thaw of a winter Chinook.
What's at the Farmers Market
Wyoming's market scene in December is indoor winter markets, holiday markets, and on-ranch sales in Cheyenne, Laramie, Sheridan, Cody, and the valleys. The durable harvest holds through the cold: storage potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, and winter squash cured in fall and keeping for months. The state's signature grass-fed beef, along with lamb and bison, is a holiday-season mainstay from local ranches, sold as roasts, steaks, and freezer shares.
Holiday markets add cut evergreens, wreaths, and Wyoming honey, jarred preserves and chokecherry jelly, dried beans and grains, and eggs and cold-hardy greens — spinach, kale, and mache — from the few growers running heated hoop houses against the deep cold. Store roots cool, dark, and humid and squash cool and dry, keep apples cold and separate, and the storage harvest will outlast the longest, coldest nights of the year.
Night Sky This Month
December gives Wyoming the longest, darkest nights of the year under some of the clearest, driest, most light-free skies in the country. The Red Desert and southwest basins are a famously dark destination, the backcountry of Yellowstone and Grand Teton darker still, and even the edges of towns like Lander, Pinedale, and Saratoga sit under skies where the winter Milky Way is plain. The cold, dry air gives crystalline, steady viewing for anyone willing to brave the deep cold — dress in serious layers and let your eyes adapt for twenty minutes.
The brilliant winter sky stands at its best: Orion rides high in the south with the glowing Orion Nebula in his sword, his belt pointing down to blazing Sirius and up to orange Aldebaran beside the tiny dipper of the Pleiades. The whole winter hexagon wheels overhead through the faint winter Milky Way. The Geminid meteor shower, the year's richest, peaks around December 14, often delivering dozens of bright meteors an hour from a dark Wyoming basin — and the Ursids follow near the solstice.
Exact planet positions and this year's Geminid timing and moon phase shift year to year — the printable Wyoming night-sky guide lists the dates and the darkest viewing sites near you.
Butterflies & Pollinators
No butterflies fly in a Wyoming December — the basins are frozen, the peaks buried in snow, and the whole state locked in deep winter. The summer's species are dormant in forms built to survive the brutal cold. Mourning cloaks, Milbert's tortoiseshells, and California tortoiseshells overwinter as adults, wedged behind the loose furrowed bark of plains cottonwoods, in woodpiles, rock crevices, and unheated sheds along the Green, Snake, and North Platte bottoms, their tissues loaded with antifreeze compounds that let them endure deep subzero spells so they can fly over snowmelt on the first warm March day. The western tiger swallowtail waits out the cold as a chrysalis on a streamside willow or cottonwood twig, and Weidemeyer's admiral as a half-grown caterpillar in a rolled aspen-leaf shelter in the foothills. High in the Tetons and Wind Rivers the Rocky Mountain parnassian sleeps as an egg or tiny larva among the snow-buried stonecrop and talus, insulated by the very snowpack that buries it. The deep dark of December is the season to plan a high-altitude pollinator garden — milkweed, balsamroot, lupine, penstemon, and a long aster succession — for the short, intense summer to come.
Trees This Month
December gives Wyoming over fully to its winter trees. The native plains cottonwoods stand leafless and massive along the frozen Green, Snake, North Platte, and Bighorn, their deeply furrowed gray bark unmistakable against the snow, and the quaking aspen stands on the mountain slopes show only their pale chalk-white trunks, the buds already set for a spring months away. The streamside willows and boxelders are bare branchwork over the iced creeks.
The conifers carry the deep winter as they always have. Lodgepole pine blankets the snow-laden Yellowstone and Medicine Bow plateaus, Douglas-fir, Engelmann spruce, and subalpine fir hold the slopes under heavy snow, and the wind-twisted limber and whitebark pines grip the storm-scoured ridges, their cached seed feeding Clark's nutcrackers through the cold. On the dry foothills and basin breaks the Rocky Mountain junipers hold gray-green needles and frosted blue cones, the toughest trees of a hard land, and around the towns the planted Colorado blue spruce and ponderosa pine wear the holiday snow. They are the green that holds against the year's longest, coldest nights.
Go deeper with the Wyoming guides
The complete Wyoming birding, native-plant, wildflower, and night-sky guides — or the whole year in one bundle.
Same month elsewhere: December in Alabama · December in Arizona · December in Arkansas