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.

A Tracking Snow

A new snow, a tracking snow. We walk out the driveway, Chet and I, looking at the signs left by all who passed in the night. 

Ah, bah, a housecat. I don't realize how much cats hunt our place until it snows. We have temporal separation. They're doing their work at night; I'm out in the daytime. Clever cats. Cat tracks have a very round look to them, and are clawless, and are arranged in a neat, straight line.

The next set I find I much prefer. A mink came loping along here last night!

Lovely little fine-toed tracks, more or less paired. Why the bright orange smartgloves? So I can find them, first, and so I can take photos while wearing them. I've already lost one of them. I rain gloves.

The mink tracks appear in bunches of four with a space in between the bunches, as the animal bound/shuffles along. It's a lopey gait, hump-backed, somewhere in between a shuffle and a leap.

I've seen only one mink in our 22 years here, and it was a brownblack beauty, bearing down on a very wet, bedraggled, shocky cottontail. I was guessing they'd tangled and the mink was about to finish it off in the dewy grass. We heard the scream that confirmed that hunch. You go ahead and help yourself to our rabbits. They'll make more.

Compare and contrast mink, above, with the gray squirrel tracks below. Squirrels have a rabbit-like forefoot plant behind the hindfoot. Think of a bunny hopping, with its big hind feet in front of its forefeet.

More squirrel tracks:

and just a bit farther down the driveway, the clumsy stars of Virginia opossum:

You can see the telltale tail drag marks in both these shots, above and below.

An eastern cottontail. Most people know these tracks. The feet are so heavily furred that you're hard-pressed to make out the toesies. Hind feet to the right, forefeet to the left. The rabbit is traveling left to right. 

This is all one night in our driveway. Obviously, a crittercam planted there would be lots of fun!

I have to run a mile and a half to find a coyote, though it could have just as easily been in our driveway, too. This one's walking up the drive to Waxler Church. All my kind of people go there.

See how large the intervals between the paired tracks is? Bigger animal, longer stride. 

How do I know it's a coyote and not a domestic dog? Well, the feet are elongate and very neat.

But I know also because the domestic dog walks sloppy.  While the coyote places his hind foot in the track of his forefoot, the happy dog drags his toes and ambles and shambles. His is not a neat straight line. His is staggered.

He's careless and joyful. He's Chet Baker. Dum de dum de dum.

We get to the Waxler Church, and a housecat has been sitting on the stoop, waiting for something or someone. Beautiful little tracks, and a place where it sat for awhile, shifting its feet in the cold. 

And on the way home, Chet Baker provides another Magnetic North Poo Sample. This, the third, and the only time he's been off a north-south axis. He's pointed 10 degrees N NW. Not bad. Not much of a deviation, if you ask me. Nobody knows why dogs tend to line up on a north-south axis when they poop. But it's been making the news nationwide as well as in Whipple. Please do not tell Chet Baker I published this photo. He'd be mortified.