Animal Tracking School

Please pardon the interruption in the Dean's Fork story. There's this thing called spring ephemerals, and in order to be of most use to my readers, I decided to publish the ephemerals posts while they were blooming in southeast Ohio. I knew you wouldn't mind. 

We've now made it through another winter, and it's early spring 2017. I hadn't been up to the beaver  pond since late September 2016. I didn't want to see it dry; it depressed me so. On March 28,  just the end of last month, I went on a walk from the house, intending to turn right when I got to the road and take my usual route to the lower end. I hoped to meet up with a skunk, as I have on earlier walks, but none appeared this time. That's OK. I would find even more wonderful things.

Skunk selfie. My only one to date. I plan to get more this summer. It's not that hard. Skunks don't pay much attention to me.

I made my way from the hayfield down into the woods, headed for the Fork. Seven fox sparrows rustled and scratched, and hopped up one by one to eye me briefly, then go back to their work. They're migrating through, headed north, and one even sang, a tentative, wandering melody that sounds like a white-throated sparrow who's been listening to meadowlarks. 

 The next thing I found was a bobcat print! Just about twice too big to be a housecat, but otherwise very similar. Look at the three-lobed rear edge of its pad, those lovely oval-round toes, and lack of any claw marks. Ahh, good fine silty mud is a beautiful thing. You'll find me out after rains and snows, finally able to get a read on my neighbors' doings.

Bobcat, hind (top) and front (bottom) prints

I find bobcat scat all the time. And it's hard to take a walk without finding their tracks. I love knowing they're around, all around. 

They don't even bother to cover their poop around here.

Wild turkey poop is everywhere, too. There are a jillion turkeys in the woods these days, thanks to the cicada hatch of 2016. Everybody ate.

You can tell this is bird poop by the white urates. Lovely twisty cylindrical galliforme poop with the sun coming up over Dean's Fork.

I kept walking and found most excellent pair of coonhands, the first of the spring. One reason trying to text on my phone with its persistent and maddening AutoCorrect is so frustrating is that I have to try three or four times to get a word like coonhands past it. No. I don't mean coin hands. No. I don't mean coonhounds. I mean coonhands dammit!!

some coywolf poop  (rawther large)

and a very nice double pair of coywolf tracks. They're much larger than fox tracks; neater and narrower than domestic dog tracks. Note how the large heel pad is two lobed (the bobcat's is three lobed) and heart-shaped; how the front two toes are long and narrow.  

Here's a domestic dog track (a big one) from the same area. It's much rounder and spreads more overall than the coywolf track, and it has the two big claw marks in front that mean it's not a cat.  Dog spoor is kind of staggered. They're sloppy walkers compared to coywolves and foxes and bobcats, whose tracks are in a neat line.

 I'll admit, I got kind of excited when I found these prints, because I couldn't find claw marks on the first dozen I found, and they were so huge!

But they're dog tracks, all right. I hope Chet and I don't meet up with this one. From the depth of the tracks, it's a very heavy animal. Big! 

So I'm trucking along finding one great track in the fresh mud after another. Here's a big old buck who's in a hurry and leaping. You can see the smeared imprint where he slid, and the two fetlock toes are sinking in, because his "ankle" joint is flexing all the way down, and he's so heavy. 

I find a section of Dean's Fork that has raccoon (bottom left), bobcat (just above the coon on left margin of photo) and striped skunk (right margin, deep claw prints) all together!! I have just come out on the road from the steep descent through the woods. As I cross a tributary to the main stream, a great sense of peace comes over me. I feel at home on this road. The sight and sound of running water sets me at ease. I smile, though there's no one there to see. Dean's Fork is working its magic on me again.

Next: a great discovery.

Reading Summer's Best Book: Animal Tracking on Dean's Fork

 It's good to have a place that fixes you, a guaranteed cure for whatever ails you. Dean's Fork is a medicine that I take regularly. When I have the time to do the whole road, it's a seven mile roundtrip of cure.

 It's downhill all the way. So it's uphill all the way home. Which is kind of cool--I just cruise along letting gravity and curiosity take me farther than I probably ought to go. It's easy to go all the way to the end. Then I pay the price coming back, but the uphill is so gradual and I stop so much that I don't even notice it.

 A midsummer morning is best, for the chicory's out then. After a rain is awesome. My "book" is freshly imprinted with good things to read.  Raccoon:

 A fresh kill, probably by a screech-owl, spattered across the road. The little owl probably reached into a roost hole in the wee hours and pulled his supper out, then fluttered down to the road with it to kill and pluck it. A downy woodpecker would be a pretty good talon-ful for a screech owl, and it would need room to work. Of course it could have been a Cooper's hawk who dun it, too. Haven't seen evidence of sharp-shins nesting in the area this year.

It's a downy woodpecker, most likely a juvenile. Juvenile downies are old enough now for all of their feathers to be out of sheath, so I'm not going by that. The hint is in the yellow staining on the tips of the tail feathers, upper left. That came from the sawdust and droppings in the nest cavity, where the bird sat for a long time. The other hint is the lack of wear on the feathers. By this time of year, adult downies have a lot of wear on their tired feathers. While we are looking at this, dig the tribal coolness of the pattern on those tail feathers!

I think this is an American toadlet, about to leave its puddle. It's maturing too early to be a gray tree frog. Deans Fork is a giant herp factory, with its deep, persistent puddles in the truck tire ruts all along its shaded length. This spring was a total bust for mountain chorus frogs, spring peepers and wood frogs. Even American toads had a terrible time, breeding as they do in May. Very few made it, because it started out nice and wet and then dried up completely. The rains started in June, too late for the early breeders. But the gray tree frogs, which rely on midsummer rains for ephemeral puddles, are having a banner year. Most puddles I see now are packed with gray tree frog taddies. This is why amphibians live a long, long time. Not every year allows them to reproduce.

The old gristmill that used to be a destination for me is now just a roof on a pile of chestnut, thanks to the Derecho of June 29, 2012. It is still beautiful, but I miss the mill. This is what she was in her golden years, before the storm.

And now, all fallen in. It feels a little odd to have been here long enough to be able to reminisce about its past glory, but not as odd, I expect, as it would feel to be here long enough to remember when it was a working gristmill. I suspect the old fellow who still runs cattle here can remember that. I have run into him a couple of times. He makes me laugh because he cusses so much, wrassling tractor implements all by himself on a road where nobody goes.

I look back up the Fork and am thankful for the black barn, still standing proud, her slate roof still intact. "When the roof goes, the barn goes." DOD, talking to me again.

Down near the end, my second set of bobcat tracks, these from a small female. The first were from a big male. You'll remember these from the last bobkit post. The way the green stone kept his inside toe from hitting the mud.

The same animal:

And in a wet spot nearby, a mink! (Or, correction: probably a fox squirrel, thanks to an anonymous commenter.) Bunching up his tracks in fours, his odd little crescent-shaped heels giving him away. Hind paws are the bigger ones, on either side of the two front paws. Picture him humping along rabbit-like, his hindfeet striking ahead of his forefeet. That would be a squirrely way to travel more than a minky way.

I smile big to find tracks from a tiny box turtle, dragging his tiny turtle tail in the fresh mud, headed to get a drink. His plastron is only an inch across. Box turtle tracks are rare, rare, rare, and these are my first set of juvenile box turtle tracks! Knowing there is a juvenile out there, knowing that somehow two box turtles bumped into each other a couple of springs ago and the female managed to lay eggs that June and miraculously get them past all the coons and possums and snakes for three months until they hatched, makes me SO happy. Taking the Dean's Fork cure, I am. Reading a really good book in this mud. 

My friend Michael, a daylily breeder, calls these "ditch lilies." A European import, now in bloom all along the roadsides. Now I call them that, too. I've got the damn things spreading all through my front flower bed. As soon as they're done blooming they're going, to make more room for things I really want. It will be about the third time I've been sure I've dug them all out. They always win, and come back stronger than ever. D'oh! Ditch lilies!

But they look mighty fine down here on Dean's Fork.

Bacon and I look back up the Fork.

Blue sky has been very rare this summer, and I'm loving its reflection on the water.

I can never get enough of this vista, looking back up toward the black barn. 

Sometimes you get a dog in your vista, sometimes you don't. 

We'll keep loping down Dean's Fork on Sunday. 

About That Baby Bobcat

I think in another epoch, I'd have been sitting around a fire, telling stories. I'd keep all those cavepeople coming back night after night for a nice installment of How I Outsmarted the Cave Bear and Lived to Tell the Tale. I'd earn my piece of roast beast, giving them something to think about, a nice bedtime story.

It's taken me awhile to get to a place from which I can write this post. I have had a lot to process and come to terms with. But I'm finally there. The thing about blogging is, if you start telling a good story before you know how it ends, you can be in for a surprise, and not necessarily a nice one, and then you've got to figure out how to convey that to many thousands of people. This is why I sometimes wind up not blogging about some of the best things, because I don't want to have everyone fall in love with some creature, and then be crushed when things don't end so well. For instance, I've raised three beautiful brown thrashers to from Day 9 to release this summer, but I didn't blog them, first because, feeding them every half-hour, then every hour, I didn't have time to, and second because I was afraid they might not all make it. Because you just never know with young things. You're raising them using an artificial diet in artificial surrounds, and who knows? Maybe you get that diet wrong, and they don't do well. I'm happy to say that the thrashers are healthy and sleek and strong and have been free for over a week and are lighting up our lives, hanging around the yard, still swooping in for handouts. So maybe you'll see them here before too long. Or maybe the world will just keep sweeping me along with new things to write about, and I'll save them for the next book.

So I went on a 7.6 mile run/lope down Dean's Fork today, and it was all so beautiful and wild and heartening that I was finally OK with having to tell you that the bobkitten I took in will not be coming back to Indigo Hill for release. It is a strange story, and there's more to it than just OOH and AHH. The minute I had that cat in my care, I went into a 36-hour panic attack about the possibility that it might be euthanized. I was so afraid that if I went through the proper channels and contacted my county wildlife officer, who would then have to contact the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, that some kind of ruling would come down from the state of Ohio that the kitten would be taken from me and put down. My fear may seem irrational, but it was very, very real to me, and I grappled with it, pacing in circles as I made phone calls trying to figure out the right thing to do for Bobkit. At the same time, I knew I had to go through the proper official channels for this state threatened species, so I steeled myself and made the call. To my immense relief, my kind county wildlife officer showed up the next morning to pick up the kitten, then transfer him to an intern who would drive him to a regional ODNR office, from which he'd then be taken to Ohio's only qualified bobcat rehabilitator in Lake County, up near Cleveland. I could hardly believe it was true, that Bobkit would have a chance to grow up and be returned to the wild. I was so thrilled that everything seemed to be going OK. I told myself that my fear was irrational; that the state would do right by this animal and the people who'd found it and cared for it.

I went off to Iowa with my kids, and after we returned I got a phone call from a District Manager of ODNR in my area. He was very kind and very sorry to have to tell me that my worst fears had been realized. The bobkitten had, in fact, been put down. It seems he was taken to another district office prior to being taken to the rehabilitator, and while he was there lots of people were looking at him, and one employee wanted to take his photo, but didn't want a dead mouse in the picture. Which I had given him so he'd have a meal for the road. He loved those little mousies, and he had a very small tank, and it would be at least five hours before he got to his next meal. So I sent a mouse for the road.  She opened his carrier and reached in to move the mouse, and the bobkitten took exception to that. He lunged and grabbed her hand and he would not let go, because he was a wild bobcat, and he thought she was taking away his food. And nobody should get anywhere near a wild bobcat with bare hands, because bobcats are like honey badgers, whether they're adorable and tiny or big and brawny. They're tough animals. Bobkit was just doing what comes naturally.

Because there was a remote possibility that the kitten could be rabid, the difficult decision was made to euthanize him for testing. The only way you can test for rabies is to look at brain tissue. Enough said. The would-be photographer felt horrible about this, and offered to wait out a 28-day quarantine, but by then, if the kittten were rabid, she could be dead. She was overruled.

It was just a rotten thing all the way around, and I'm sure nobody felt and continues to feel worse about it than that poor woman with the bitten hand. After I got over my initial shock and anguish, I realized that that could well have been me with the horrible dilemma and the holes in my hand. After all, hadn't I made a little video of him, chewing up his mouse? Yes, I had. I'd had gloves on when I laid the mouse in his carrier, but once he latched onto it and was happily chewing, I had to take my glove off to work my iPhone. I had to make a video, because it was so amazing to see this little thing, and I wanted to share it with you. So who am I to judge her? Nobody, that's who. It could so easily have happened to me.

I cried for most of the rest of that day that I got the call, and still felt like I'd been hit by a truck the next morning. I had to tell this story to the kind people who'd rescued the kitten in the first place, and they were a worse mess than I was. I had to tell Bill and the kids and Shila, too. We'd all gotten so wrapped up in thinking we had saved him from certain death, only to unwittingly send him to another certain death. Call my day of panic a premonition...I was a nervous wreck from the moment I laid eyes on that bobkit until Officer Bear's truck disappeared down the driveway. I was so sure something would go wrong. I was right. There were just too many people in the mix.

But rabies, you can't fool around with. And a human life is more precious than a bobcat life, and that's the truth. For me, it dredged up what happened with my beloved big brown bat Darryl from the winter of 2010, who innocently spluttered while Liam and I were feeding him. And because a droplet of his saliva had landed on Liam's cheek, and maybe microdrops had landed on his lip, that constituted a possible exposure. No way around it: Darryl had to be euthanized for testing. (He tested negative for rabies, but still). And it was terrible. And that was a story that I had to tell, too. I started the windup with this post, and then told the whole awful thing in this post. Trust me, those were no fun to write. Neither is this.

I now wear a plastic face shield whenever I handle bats, no matter what. Thanks, Dr. Starship. And of course, I wore gloves to handle the bobkit, but still. If he'd wanted to nail me while I was filming him, he could have.

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, sorry I started a story that I couldn't finish well. But a baby bobcat in a plastic pet carrier was just too much---I had to show him to you. And I decided, firmly, upon learning that he was gone, that I wouldn't--couldn't--tell you that. You were too in love with him, and I didn't want to crush you. I didn't want to have to write this.

 But I had a change of heart on June 24, a bright summer day with high puffy clouds and birds singing everywhere.

To reward myself for finishing my book read, I went for a 7.6 mile run/lope/amble down Dean's Fork that day.

 Halfway down the road, I found these dead-fresh tracks in fine mud. Rear paw, 2 1/8" from top to heel, on the left. Front paw, 2 1/4" top to heel, on right. Adult bobcat, a nice sized one too. That's the second set of bobcat tracks I've found in the same stretch of puddles.

In this close-up you can see the perfect roundness of the pugmarks, the lack of any nail imprint; the grainy texture of the pads and even the fur that grows in between them. Beautiful. Life-affirming. Just here, just now.

I started thinking then about telling you what really happened.  I knew you'd ask, and I didn't know what I'd say. "No news?" "Haven't heard?" 

How long could I hold you all off? Would you forget about that bobkit? No way. You'd be asking along about late summer.

You're going to get the truth out of me here. You always have, even if it's painful.

As I loped along, there was a sound like someone was throwing handfuls of millet in the weeds along the road. It was extraordinary. I stopped and looked and found that the common plantain was riddled with holes made by flea beetles, and it was the beetles leaping on spring-loaded legs from the plantain leaves that made the millet spray sound.

And I thought, isn't that remarkable, that this plant is getting devoured, and that there are enough flea beetles to make noticeable noise all the way down the road! I'm sure it sucks for the plantain, but it was pretty cool for me.

Life is beautiful, even when it sucks.

Dean's Fork teaches me that. I saw so many incredible things this day--baby birds everywhere, learning how to forage--and I just drank it all in, and I felt so good, knowing that there are these wild places all around where things like this go on whether we're there to notice them or not.

I got all the way down to the end of Dean's Fork, and I was almost four miles from home. A rose-breasted grosbeak sang over a cerulean warbler, also singing. Breeding, both of them, north meets south. Fantastic. 

And I looked down and was reading the silt for more tracks when I found this one.

Bobcat. Another bobcat! But wait--only three toes on the foot?? No. There was a little green pebble sticking up, and that pebble was enough to keep the cat's inner toe from hitting the ground. 

Which along with the small size of the track, told me that this was a lighter-weight, smallish animal. I found a nice double set about a foot away, from the same series. Measured, the track was 1 3/4" from top to bottom. Too large for a housecat, which would be 1 1/8" top to bottom. 

Smallish female, maybe, or maybe a baby bobcat. 

And I realized, gazing at this track set, a smile spreading across my face, that I need to take a longer view on this tragic tale of a rescue gone wrong. And that long view is that there are lots of bobcats in Ohio now, probably more bobcats than have been here since pre-colonial times. Because there is lots more forest than there's been since then. The forest has come back, and people aren't persecuting bobcats any more, so they've come back too.

I've said it before: Wildlife rehabilitation is for people. The odd bobcat or brown thrasher that we manage to save; the fawn we bottle-raise; the squirrel we scoop up mean virtually nothing on a population level. Unless you're talking about saving the life of one of the world's 603 (as of February 2015) whooping cranes,  and putting it back into the breeding population, you really aren't making an impact one way or the other on these more abundant species by saving one here and there.

You are making an impact on the life of that one animal, on your life, and the lives of the people who get involved in helping it make it back to the wild. When you tell its story, you get people involved and caring. And we very much need to care about other life forms, to empathize and show them mercy and kindness. That's what makes us human, and that's what elevates us from animal, vegetable or mineral--that ability to give a hoot about some poor helpless creature, to stop what we're doing and try to help it.

The bigger story here is that there are enough bobcats that we're starting to see them hit on the highways (saw my first just north of Exit 6 on I-77 near Marietta this spring!). This may sound odd, but I was happy and excited to see that, because it means there are enough bobcats around for that to happen.

There are enough bobcats around that I found tracks from two different animals, one likely a juvenile, on Dean's Fork in one morning. And as the raincrow flies, that's a couple miles from my house.

There are enough bobcats around that a juvenile left a poo in my driveway for me to find as I returned from that same walk that same morning. So make that fresh stanky sign from a third bobcat in the same morning!

Perhaps it was the child of this beautiful female who immortalized herself at the same spot in our driveway on July 8, 2014.

photo by Corey Husic's Bushnell Trailcam.

They walk among us, on midsummer mornings. 

There are enough bobcats around that a kitten ended up stuck in a drainpipe in my friends' yard. 

There are enough bobcats around that he found his way to my loving, gloved hands. 

And for that I am deeply thankful. 

Hodge is one of my dearest friends. She has two wonderful housecats, Java and Star. So Hodge was among the first I sent a photo to when I came by the bobkitten. And she was among the first I told when I learned he wouldn't be returning to Indigo Hill to grace our woods.

Here's what she wrote back to me. 

Oh oh oh oh.  Oh, why, oh why?

Okay. Don't go there.  The whys are useless in this case.  

By which I mean, please release all notions out of your conscience that your putting that mouse for the road in the carrier was how this happened.  Not Your Fault, no way.  

You gave him three square meals and a safe place to land.  You made him purr.  You own that forever.  Somewhere in bobcat heaven there's a kit who knew there was a you, and that's a good thing.  

The Best Game Camera Photo Ever

Corey stayed with us for a glorious week leading up to Phoebe's birthday. Wherever he goes, nature follows. Corey's mom Diane told us that, and it's true, it's true. And our streak of amazing nature karma, which includes flying squirrels and box turtles and gray foxes, continued unbroken. Aided and abetted by Corey's magical presence, his way of noticing everything. 

He brought his Bushnell game camera, unbidden. I thought that was the coolest idea. Brought his fiddle too, but that's another story...

He and Liam went out to mount the camera. All I can say about this first shot is that Liam comes by his impishness honestly. It's 4:01 pm.

They all go out in the Honda a few minutes later. 

Dad comes home in the Bird Watcher's Digest van at 7:23 pm.

At 11:06 pm, the gray fox we've been seeing shows up. You can tell it's a gray fox and not a red by the black tail tip. All color phases of red fox have a white tail tip.

It crosses the driveway.

Not much happens until 3:41 AM, when a raccoon patrols for tadpoles in the driveway puddles. 

And then there's a long quiet spell until I come by, headed out for a late morning run, at 10:29 AM on July 8. I didn't even know they'd put the game cam out, but I saw it as I trotted by and thought I'd wave.  I think this photo is funny enough to swallow my pride-gullllp!!-- and post it anyhoo.

Chet Baker is usually chasing bunnehs in the yard (up driveway to left in photo) when we start our run, and July 8 was no exception. He straggles along 12 seconds later. It is hard to catch Bacon on a game cam, but we succeeded. 

 

So I get back from my run at about 12:45 pm, and Phoebe meets me at the door with the hugest grin on her face. WAIT 'til you see what we caught on the game cam!!! she squeals. And I'm thinking, 

"Probably me, looking like a goober." True. But...

She opens the laptop and runs me through all the photos I've just posted. And then there's this one.

Taken at 11:42 AM, July 8, 2014, in our driveway. IN OUR DRIVEWAY!!!!! In MIDMORNING!!! 

Well, after a moment of stunned silence when I was just gaping like a goldfish, there followed about five straight minutes of high-pitched squealing, jumping around like Daffy Duck on speed, and incredulous, hysterical laughter. 

Let's have a closer look.

OMG OMG OMG OMG CatGods walk amongst us!!

Slowly, it turns out, because that cat triggered the camera three times in a row.

I just cannot get over the ornate inner leg barring, the spots on flanks and hams, the natty black and snow-white ear bars, the black-tipped tail with white trim. The soft, soft paws. It makes me smile to think that while we've got zero tolerance for feral housecats on this sanctuary, I would serve up wild turkey poults on a silver platter to this great slab-sided native cat without even thinking twice. 

So I wanted to know how tall this animal might be. See that orange leaf just to its left? I went out and measured the leaf. Then blew the photo up and counted how many leaf-lengths the bobcat was from ground to shoulder. It worked out to 21.5" at the shoulder. Right in the median range for bobcat. And quite a bit taller than Chet Baker, as you'll notice. Let's hope they never run into each other in the driveway. I had not thought of bobcats as so...diurnal. But they're also about ten times sharper than we are, so they'll just melt into the woods when they hear us. Not worried in the least about an altercation. That beautiful cat would be GONE at the first footfall.

This is the last photo.

I believe it to be an adult female bobcat, because I think you'd be able to see its manparts at this angle if it were a boycat.

Not even an hour later, Corey and Phoebe walk out to see what the camera caught. Little do they know here...

The whole thing is so beautiful and perfect I just can't even believe it. I still can't believe it. Way to make my day, week, month, year, Corey!! 

I've always known they were here. I photograph their sign. In fact, I'd taken this perfect track shot on nearby Dean's Fork just a few days earlier. If you click on the photo you can see the grain of its pawskin. It's 54 mm, or a little over 2" across. You can tell it's a bobcat by the overall roundness of the print, and the lack of claw marks. 

And I shoot their scat every time I find it. This one, with a neat little rodent jaw embedded. Taken at a lair I found high up in some rocks over a creek on our property. There was lots of poo there. This is where the cat had lain and watched the valley below. Generations of bobcats have probably relaxed there, stubby tails twitching.

And this, bobcat scat, very fresh, made up of turkey poult feathers and bones. It's what's for dinner this time of year. Bobcat scat breaks off in squared, short sections. On our gravel road.

Three evenings earlier, on July 5, 2014, Liam, Phoebe, Corey and I were returning from a bike ride, coming down our gravel road. And as we rounded a bend I alone saw a spaniel-sized, jet-black, apparently tailless feline bound across the road and into the woods. After I realized it was not a giant black rabbit (the only thing my poor brain could produce, given that black bobcat wasn't on my radar at the moment), I knew it had to be a rare melanistic bobcat. Someone sent me this game cam photo taken in Vinton County, Ohio, a few years ago. They exist. They walk amongst us. Perhaps the one I spotted will be next on Corey's game cam!!

For me, these are powerful things. Visitations. Signs. Validations. I need them, so I'm taking them as such. I'm choosing to interpret a black bobcat crossing my path as the best of luck. And a red one, walking calmly up the driveway toward our house in late morning, as a gift from above, a tight hug from the Beyond. Bring it on. 

Corey resets the camera, hoping to capture the cat's face on her way back out the driveway.

Reports back to Nature Fairy.

You made my momma's day. Thank you!