When You Don't Know

We walked on down the Fork that evening and saw some really cool tracks in the fresh silt. Some were easy to identify, like these chipmunk prints, overlain by the small asterisks of white-footed mouse (to the left of the photo). 

Some were just weird and I, who function as the Answer Chimp for so many people as regards natural history, had no idea what I was looking at. I thought this trail might have been made by a tiny whitetail fawn, because of the split in the foot, but it isn't quite perfect or right. Unless it was just born, and its feet were very soft and the hooves not hardened. I just don't know. It's not often that I don't know even a little something about a track. Hmm. Input welcome. The way they're in a double line bugs me, too. The creature has a little weight to it, from the ridge of mud at the back of the track. Just doesn't look like a box turtle...no claw punctures, no tail or shell drag. 

Closer:

For comparison, here are some for sure whitetail fawn prints, from June 2, 2018, right behind its mama's hoofprints. Maybe. Size is good. And if it was brand new, it was probably stumbling, which could account for the asymmetry of the track. So maybe I've got that one figured out. 

Then there was this amazing sinuous mark. The whole thing is about 3' long and 1 1/4" wide. 

The tiny marks along the side didn't look like feet to me. Thought it might be a baby turtle, but the "footprints" look too fine, too pointed, to me, and there isn't a tail drag mark. I decided it might have been made by a snake, navigating the puddle as it drank. (The imprint was about 1 1/4" wide).  Shila suggested that the fine marks might be the impressions made by the snake's ribs as it hitched through the silt, as that's how snakes move--by hitching along moving their ribs to walk their spine along their path. I loved that suggestion. 

But as always, I'm open to others.

 

Here's a closeup of the fine marks on either side. Halp.

These, I knew, were from a bird. By the size of the feet, the way it was walking, and where it was (smack in a LOWA territory), I thought it was probably a Louisiana waterthrush. 

This is a track I've never found on Dean's Fork. And there was only one! I'm virtually sure this is a river otter's front foot! I know you might be thinking raccoon, but coon fingers are much longer and thinner, with more prominent claws. Otter claws barely register, even in soft mud. They're just wee pinpricks here,  the toes are short, and the toe tips are kind of bulbous.

Alongside a deep rut full of water was this beautiful feather, from the breast or belly of a barred owl. I've found wing feathers, but I'd never found a barred owl body feather. That felt like a gift. The whole walk felt like a gift: the beaver pond, laboriously but seemingly magically restored; the beaver gliding in his watery realm. The tracks, known and unknown. Those beautiful kids walking ahead of me, because their legs are so much longer and they stop and kneel less than I do. The fact that they love taking these walks of discovery with their mama. 

Something I wanted to show them: the Corn Salad Festival. Astute blogfans will notice that this is taking place on the very grounds of the Ironweed Festival. You could have knocked me over with a barred owl belly feather, because the flowers of this weak-stemmed plant, rising over the grasstops, looked like snow in late May. 

Valerianella umbilicata, or Navel Corn Salad, likes the open moist meadow. The weird name comes from its fruit, which apparently resembles a navel. It is related to the popular salad green mache, but is a different (native) species. Need to check on the fruit as it develops. Here's a photo by Steven J. Baskauf from http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/24344.htm

I guess it's kind of umbilical. Pretty cute. 

I've never seen it bloom in a blizzard like this, and I've been down here in late May a lot. Just goes to show you that one year is not like another. I brought Shila down two days later and the show was mostly all over. Talk about an ephemeral!

I love how it looks with the old bar gate and the black barn. Way back there, you can see just the roof of the chestnut gristmill that used to stand so proud.

It was all too beautiful. It looked like a Hudson River School painting, my beautiful kids lounging in this impossible landscape like the pastoral peasants. All it needed was a few cattle, but they haven't been in this pasture for several years. I miss them.

Dean's Fork is always changing, evolving, being changed by human activity. Nothing is the same on my walks, no matter how many times I walk it. Seasons change, plants come into and out of bloom, birds set up territory, breed and leave, and I am dazzled by it all, witness to something ancient and new, all at once. 

Woodpecker Tracks and The Principle of Situational Awareness

We're still rambling around in the ice, in the gold, blue and white wonderland. 

Soon I'd climbed so high the Toothless Lady could no longer be seen.

I saw a familiar bird take off from the snowy road, and stepped off the side so I wouldn't obscure its tracks with mine. 

I was talking once with a friend of mine, comparing notes. He said that if he were on a first date and she walked over tracks he was looking at, that would be it. It would be over, just like that. I still chuckle thinking about it.

I laughed and said the same would be true for me. If you're walking with me, don't be stomping over tracks.  When I see tracks, I stop and immediately jump off the trail so as not to spoil them. Because who knows what story is written in the snow or mud? 

Walking over a story like this is like trampling a book.

I was very pleased to find these tracks, the first such I'd seen. You might notice they are odd, long-toed, and zygodactyl. Two toes pointing front, two toes pointing back. These are yellow-shafted flicker tracks!! 

Flicker tracks are very hard to find and harder to photograph because flickers are almost always foraging in grass. They look for anthills to plunder. They do not frequent mud puddles, unless they're drinking. And a flicker on the ground in the snow is pretty rare.

Wild turkey and white-tailed deer tracks, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. But a tableau with wild turkey, white-tailed deer and flicker tracks is a rare one indeed. You can see that the flicker hops. His tracks are paired and there are gaps between them.

A huge part of the concept of situational awareness is being able to appreciate when you've found something cool, maybe unrepeatable. You keep a catalogue of the things you've experienced in your head, and you run through it when you find something novel. Nope, never seen that before. That's cool! You note the moment. You savor it. A juxtaposition like this can make your day, if you're situationally aware. Let's all strive to be more situationally aware! As you will see, it took awhile for the true import of these woodpecker tracks to sink in on me. I was distracted by the light.

I hurried onward. There were white pines to admire, pines festooned in crystal.

Come on, sun. Hit these pines for me. 

Multiflora rose and dead pine, dignified by an icy case.

Bam. Thank you. 

A sentinel oil derrick, stilled for now, backed by glistening pines.  Like a giant drinking bird, about to plunge.

I hurried to the allee of pines in the dying light.  Slashes of low sun fell across. I didn't have time to walk it. I stopped, smiling as I remembered hugging Chet the last time we were here in the snow. He had his little red jacket on. 

I felt his presence with me. I just wished I could touch him, smell his not-so-great breath, and his honey-scented ears. 

There were a few dying rays, and I meant to catch them. No time to mull.

The sun illuminated the old barn and I knew there would be good light below.

I hurried to the lower level, where the cows once lived.

Today, the dark wood, slashed with warm sun, framed a stunning fairy world just outside. I don't expect to see something like this again. Note to self: Head to back barn in next ice storm.

Oh I hated to leave. But I had to catch the sunset, going on outside.

The old house stands stoically even as it falls apart.

I whipped around the corner to catch another image of the abandoned couch. There are a few things about this image I want to bring to your attention. First, snow on a couch.  There's that. Second, the gray cloud  shadow that looks like smoke, curling out of a chimney that probably hasn't known a flame for 50 years. Third, the poison ivy vine fuzzing the chimney's outlines, so it looks like the photo is out of focus. It's all so wonderful.

Ah, the dying of the light. I hurried out the road, which is really a driveway for the farmstead. My tracks coming in are happy, wandering, toe-out tracks. My tracks going out are straight, far apart, hurrytothelight tracks.

A white-throated sparrow surprised me by popping up out of the shrubbery and sitting for a few moments, backlit. Oh my. Oh my my my. I shot as long as he granted me the honor. Since this photo was taken, they've started to sing their quavering Poor Sam Peabody song from the thickets as night falls. I love hearing them sing before they head north to the sweet scented balsam fir forests of Canada.  Singing over the woodcock's peents and twitters...it's divine.

Oh! turkey tracks! Must capture. I trotted along the side of the road so as not to compromise them.

When I got back to the spot, I studied the flicker tracks again, and wondered what the woodpecker was doing in the road. I studied the patterns. The tracks concentrated around holes in the gravel. In those holes were halved hickory nuts!

The flicker was using the frozen soil as a vise with which to secure hickory nuts for pounding open. 

In each hole was a halved hickory nut with the meat gone. Well doesn't that beat all?

Not only had I found my first flicker tracks, but I learned something too. 

There were two hairy woodpeckers under the hickory, as well, so some of these could be hairy woodpecker tracks. Again, I've never found those. 

Woodpecker tracks, like hummingbird tracks, are hard to photograph. It takes a special situation like this. It occurred to me that the deer and turkey tracks were there for a reason, too. Everyone was sniffing out the nuts from this one tree. This photo was taken about a week later, when everything had melted off. I haven't had a chance to figure out what kind of hickory it is, but the bark didn't look loose or curly enough for shagbark. Standing all alone there, it's a great big feeder for wildlife. I love knowing that. 

Here's the hickory, a photo from a couple days later. It's a living, growing wildlife feeder. 

I'll try to key it out one of these days.

I kept moving down the road, running toward the sunset. A forgotten hayroll wound up in the woods. I wondered how it had gotten there. Had it rolled down on its own? Did she jump or was she pushed?

Ahead of me, the snowy road.

And The Toothless Lady in the dying light, backed by lavender and cream clouds.  Another light painting, another unrepeatable scene.

Beside me, the unmistakable profile of Sasquatch. What else could it be? When I'm out in the countryside, I'm always Squatchin'. 

For your information, the pendulous butt of Sasquatch might just be a Canon 7D with telephoto. I've no explanation for the pointy head.

I kept an eye on the back sunset

and the lovely frieze of clouds and trees along the haymeadow

until I broke out on the county road and could see the main stage.

Had to hurry to the Shadow Barn to see what the light was doing there!

Might as well pay the Three Graces homage on my way home. 

Another highly successful excursion,  costing nothing. Powered by light, curiosity, situational awareness, and the endless quest for beauty. 

To recap: Look down a lot. Go out in new snow or new mud, after a rain. Make a habit of preserving tracks. Don't be walkin' on tracks. Follow them instead. Try not to let a track go unidentified. 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has a field guide to animal tracks. A classic by the legendary Olas Murie, newly updated (I use the original). Treat yourself. 

Stay alert to the cool stuff. Celebrate when you find something new. Let it make your day. 

WOODPECKER TRACKS JUST SAYIN' WOOT!!

I believe that about covers it. Thanks, as always, for walking with me.

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.