Wyoming Nature Guide: November 2026
November is the slide into winter across Wyoming — the last leaves gone, the high country snowed in, and the wintering elk and Trumpeter Swans returning to the National Elk Refuge as the high herds move down. Waterfowl linger on the open water, the basins turn cold and brown, and the year's first deep storms arrive.
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
November settles Wyoming's winter birds into place as the last migrants clear out. The National Elk Refuge begins its winter season — elk moving down from the high country and Trumpeter Swans returning to the spring creeks alongside wintering Barrow's and common goldeneye. Open rivers and reservoirs still hold lingering mallards, common mergansers, buffleheads, and rafts of diving ducks until the ice closes them, and Bald Eagles concentrate where the water stays open.
The open-country winter raptors are now in: Golden Eagles, Rough-legged Hawks down from the Arctic, prairie falcons, and northern shrikes hunting the sage from poles and bush-tops. Town and ranch feeders fill with black-capped and mountain chickadees, nuthatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, house finches, and dark-eyed juncos, with American tree sparrows, Cassin's finches, and in irruption years Bohemian Waxwings, redpolls, and Pine Grosbeaks arriving from the north. Flocks of gray partridge and sharp-tailed grouse work the stubble.
This month's tip: visit the National Elk Refuge as the winter spectacle assembles, and stock and clean feeders for the season ahead — the birds that will rely on them all winter are settling into their routines now.
What's Blooming
Wyoming's outdoor blooming year is over by November — hard freezes and the first lasting snows have ended the last rabbitbrush and asters, and the next wild bloom, the sagebrush buttercup, is four months away. The dormant landscape now offers only winter structure and color: the silver-gray sweep of big sagebrush across the basins, the curing tan plumes of native bunchgrasses, the dried seed heads of lupine, paintbrush, and blanketflower standing in the frost, and the persistent fruit that brightens the cold — the orange hips of wild rose, the red stems of red-osier dogwood in the draws, and the blue berry-like cones of Rocky Mountain juniper. The plumed seed of western clematis clings to the riparian thickets. Indoors, this is the start of the forcing season — paperwhites, amaryllis, and forced branches bringing the only blooms a high-country November allows.
Garden This Month
November closes out the gardening year across Wyoming. The ground freezes hard and the snows begin in earnest, so any remaining tasks are about protection and putting things away for a long, cold winter. Finish mulching garlic, perennials, and strawberries deeply with straw or leaves while you still can — the insulation guards crowns against the deep cold and the brutal freeze-thaw of foothill Chinooks. Harvest the very last cold-frame and low-tunnel greens, and add a final layer of cover over any roots you're overwintering in the ground.
Get the infrastructure away: drain and store hoses and drip lines before they freeze and split, clean, sharpen, and oil tools, and empty and store containers so they don't crack. Wrap young fruit-tree trunks against sunscald and rodent gnawing, knock the first heavy wet snows off arborvitae and young conifers, and otherwise let the snow bank where it falls over the beds — on the open high plains it is the best insulation a dormant garden will get. Then the planning season begins.
Zone 3b (Jackson Hole, high valleys): the garden is frozen and snow-covered — the work is done. Confirm garlic and perennials are deeply mulched, that snow is allowed to bank over the beds as insulation, and that tools, hoses, and irrigation are fully stored for winter.
Zone 4a (high basins, Lander, Cody): finish the last cleanup before the ground freezes hard — mulch garlic and perennials, drain and store hoses, wrap young fruit-tree trunks, and harvest any final cold-frame greens. Then the season is closed.
What's at the Farmers Market
Wyoming's outdoor farmers markets have closed for the season by November, giving way to indoor winter markets, holiday markets, and on-ranch sales in Cheyenne, Laramie, Sheridan, Cody, and the valleys. The durable harvest holds: storage potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, and winter squash cured in fall and keeping for months, along with the last apples from the warmer valleys. The state's grass-fed beef, lamb, and bison are a holiday-season mainstay from local ranches.
Look for 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. Holiday and craft markets add wreaths, cut evergreens, and baked goods. Store roots cool, dark, and humid, squash cool and dry, and apples cold and separate, and they'll carry you well into winter.
Night Sky This Month
November brings back the long, cold, exceptionally dark nights of the Wyoming winter, with the dry air giving sharp, transparent viewing for those who brave the cold. The Red Desert and southwest basins, and the backcountry of Yellowstone and Grand Teton, remain premier dark-sky destinations, with town-edge sites near Lander, Pinedale, and Saratoga easily showing the Milky Way and the autumn galaxies.
The autumn sky still rides high — the Great Square of Pegasus, Andromeda and its galaxy, and the rising winter Milky Way through Cassiopeia and Perseus — while the winter giants climb the east in the evening: the Pleiades, orange Aldebaran in Taurus, and brilliant Capella. By late evening Orion clears the horizon, the herald of the winter sky. The Leonid meteor shower peaks in mid-November, a modest shower (occasionally a storm in rare years) best after midnight from a dark basin pullout.
Exact planet positions and this year's Leonid timing shift year to year — the printable Wyoming night-sky guide lists the dates and the darkest viewing sites near you.
Butterflies & Pollinators
Wyoming's butterfly season is closed in November — the basins frozen, the peaks snowed in, and no butterflies on the wing across the state. The summer's species are now settled into their winter dormancy in forms tuned to survive the brutal cold. Mourning cloaks, Milbert's tortoiseshells, and California tortoiseshells are hibernating as adults, tucked behind the loose furrowed bark of plains cottonwoods, in woodpiles, rock crevices, and unheated outbuildings along the river corridors, their bodies loaded with antifreeze compounds against the subzero months. The western tiger swallowtail overwinters as a chrysalis fastened to a willow or cottonwood twig, and Weidemeyer's admiral as a half-grown caterpillar in a rolled aspen leaf. High in the Tetons and Wind Rivers the Rocky Mountain parnassian waits out the winter as an egg or tiny larva, insulated beneath the deepening alpine snowpack. This deep-winter stillness is the season to plan and order for a pollinator garden — native milkweed, balsamroot, lupine, penstemon, and a long aster succession — that will feed the next generation when the warmth returns.
Trees This Month
November leaves Wyoming's deciduous trees bare and the conifers in command of the winter landscape. The last gold has fallen from the plains cottonwoods along the Green, Snake, North Platte, and Bighorn, their massive gray-barked frames standing leafless over the freezing rivers, and the quaking aspen stands on the mountain slopes show only their pale chalk-white trunks against the early snow. The streamside willows and boxelders are stripped to bare branches.
The conifers carry the season ahead. Lodgepole pine blankets the snowing Yellowstone and Medicine Bow plateaus, Douglas-fir and Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir hold the slopes, and the wind-twisted limber and whitebark pines grip the storm-battered ridges. On the dry foothills the Rocky Mountain junipers keep their gray-green needles and blue cones, and around the towns the planted Colorado blue spruce, ponderosa pine, and arborvitae stand dark against the snow. Watch for last fall's tan leaves still clinging to young bur oaks in the Black Hills foothills, a trait called marcescence.
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: November in Alabama · November in Arizona · November in Arkansas