A Conversation About Keeping Track

Winter seems to have lost heart. I hope so. The days are getting longer and the sun seems to have more heat. The snow isn’t as deep and doesn’t even feel as cold to my optimistic mind. With all the sun making contrasts on snow, the tracks are more evident. This is a great time to learn about our furred and feathered neighbors.

In our part of the world, deer tracks are inevitable. If you have any kind of feeder or shelter for birds, bird imprints are nearby, whether from their tiny feet or the marks made by their wings scraping on the snow when they abruptly lift off. When the snow is fluffy enough, squirrels and rabbits leave traces of their passage, little four-packs of footprints leading away. You can almost sense their urgency. Squirrels and rabbits often behave like they’re in a panic, and in February the grey squirrels are in their early mating season (they have two per year). This accounts for the frantic chases you may see where they race up and down and around tree trunks like maniacs. The red squirrels are another story entirely. They’re smaller and less obvious, but meaner. Their mating season is later, and more sedate. But at some time every squirrel traverses through the snow and leaves a trail.

 Domestic animals have their own distinctive tracks. If you have a dog or a cat, you can readily identify their trail. The same applies for livestock. It’s usually easy to know a cow from a goat, and everybody knows horses wear shoes. If you have chickens, not only will you know what their tracks look like, but you may have an opportunity to see the tracks of foxes, raccoons, and any of the mink family, because, in nature, everybody’s hungry and a chicken dinner is haute cuisine. If you see what looks like large chicken tracks, it’s probably wild turkeys.

There will almost always be manmade tracks wherever you go. First, of course, your own. And snow toys in some places, like skis, snowshoes and snowmobiles. And the herringbone markings from tires, and the scrapings from snowplows and shovels.  And our own boots. One of the fun things about prints, especially from boots, is that they can grow. As snow melts, the tracks of a boot often enlarge. What started out as a size six may look like a size ten by the end of a sunny day.  It can be fun to  show small children and gullible tourists the “Sasquatch” prints.

Of course, snow prints can be elusive because they’re subject to temperature change or added layers of snow, but they’re easy to find and observe up close. There is another good season for finding and identifying “spoor.” A mud season is elusive and impossible to define, but there can be many opportunities to observe track in warmer weather. Basically, after any rain or flooding event, there will be an abundance of muddy spots anywhere you go. And most animals aren’t picky about walking or running through mud puddles or just plain muddy soil. Mud tracks are longer lasting than snow trails, and may even dry the tracks into little preserved records of the critter’s passing. That’s how we found out about so many dinosaurs.

Staying local, the Mountain Top Arboretum has a nice chart to use at https://www.mtarboretum.org/animal-tracks/, so while there’s snow on the ground, download a copy and head out to explore, whether at the Arboretum or elsewhere.