My lovely friends Sevaan and Tess, who do not know each other, periodically give me the ol’ “you should vlog!” Is it so I won’t send them 8 texts in a row about fisher footprints? Who’s to say!
While I’m always happy to yammer on and share my excitement about nature, and in theory I like editing videos, in practice my glitchy ancient copy of iMovie makes editing an exercise in gaaaaaaaaah.
But! Sometimes you just find some tracks in the woods and by gum, you wanna share it! So when I went to the woods a few weeks ago I flipped my phone around and shared some of my ramblies about weaselies. Ironically an unscripted vlog needs more editing, but hey, that is just how fun tracking is! It must be shared!
Have fun out there, you critter-loving woods walkers!
~Kate
(Hi Piper! Hi Lucy! Have fun exploring tracks with your supercool mom and dad!)
Prefer to listen to the story? Click the image above to hear the narrated version of this blog entry.
I was in the kitchen making dinner a few weeks ago when I heard the front door open and close, as Neil came back inside, having just completed his evening “chicken check”. “There are new tracks out by the raised beds”, he called up the stairs.
Some people enjoy sonnets, some sparkly jewels, but Neil knows the way to my heart is to tell me he has found tracks for me to explore.
Dinner will keep. Final “chicken check” happens right around dusk, and I’ve learnt it’s best to check tracks as soon as possible. Strong winds, a light snowfall, a warm morning… tracks are transient. Best when fresh. And I still had at least a half hour of twilight to use for exploring.
Arriving in the yard, I was delighted to see this serpentine figure tracing a path through the snow. As I’ve already given away in the title, these are opossum tracks and I am very fond of opossums. (Spoiler: I am very fond of nearly every animal.)
Though opossums are increasingly common in southern Ontario, they are not well-suited to our Canadian winters. The exposed skin on their tails, ears, and feet is very susceptible to frostbite. It’s a common reason for opossums to be admitted to Ontario’s wildlife centres over winter. In fact frostbite is so common for opossums in the winter months that it is mentioned as part of their tracks in one of my books, Field Guide to Tracking Animals in Snow: “…the tail drag may sometimes include blood stains–evidence of a ragged and frostbitten tail.”
The distinct five-toed track is the front right foot. The blob just behind it is the back right foot.
During the warmer months, opossums sure pull their weight with another more problematic critter that increasingly shows up in this area: ticks. Opossums both move through areas inhabited by ticks, picking up tonnes of them on their fur, and they fastidiously clean themselves. As part of their grooming, opossums swallow a very high percentage of the ticks that end up on their body. So we’re always very happy to learn these little Lyme-disease roombas are out there hoovering ticks off our property.
It seems these tracks had been made at some point during the day. I’ve read a few places that since opossums do not tolerate cold well, they will sometimes switch their usually nocturnal habits around — foraging during the day instead. Basically they forage whenever makes sense temperature-wise. Opossums do not hibernate, and must continue to find food throughout these cold months.
Alternating track opossum walking prints. This is a slow gait, with the hind foot registering just behind the front foot of the same side (in faster gaits, a hind foot tends to register ahead of the front foot). From the top of this photo, you are seeing the right front foot, with the right hind foot directly behind it — the hind foot is the more indistinct blob. A little further down and to the left of this pair you see the left front foot, with the left hind foot directly behind it. And so on.
Opossums also have a two-print “amble” track, where the hind foot registers beside the opposite front foot. This pattern is not shown in this post, but is similar to a raccoon’s “walk” gait.
If you look at the bottom left of the photo below, you will see that our little omnivorous opossum friend visited our compost bays. It came up the far left side, skirted along the top, and came back down the far right, by the active bay. The compost itself was not particularly disturbed, but it’s possible this little marsupial friend found something to eat off the top.
Below you can see the tracks that run alongside the active compost bay’s wall. The opossum clearly spent a lot of time back-and-forthing in this area, so perhaps it did find some noms after all.
Having followed the tracks as far as I could, I headed back inside for dinner. But there was one sweet little coda to this snow story. On my way back inside, I noticed a second set of tracks “joining” our opossum friend. Walking in parallel to this nocturnal marsupial were tracks from…. a cat. Parallel tracks are unstuck in time: anything that marks the snow becomes part of the same story. With diligence, you can untangle the timeline, and work out what happened when. But sometimes, on your way back inside on a chilly evening, headed to a warm bowl of stew, sometimes it is nice instead to indulge in a fantasy of an opossum and a kitty cat, headed off together on adventures unknown.
For each question I answer in the woods, five more appear. “Solved” tracks are surrounded by stories I haven’t read, and some where I don’t even know the language. I am getting better at recognizing animal tracks and sign. I can usually narrow things down so we’re at least pointed in a helpful direction. But I have so much to learn. If I have the shapes, do I have the movements, if I have the movements, do I have the “when”… It goes on and on forever. I know that I will never be done learning, and that is fine with me. I hope I will never be done learning. I love to solve a puzzle, and work a problem. But I have no illusions the puzzles will ever end. The only constant is change. Besides, as John Hodgman said, “beginnings are really the only happy endings”.
The large tracks are fox, and the small tracks crossing the path are from our mystery critter.
I did an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, with extra attention to the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Philosophy is not where I started off in school, but it is where I ended up. Because philosophy contained the most “whys”.
Philosophy let me dip my toes in the most worlds. I could study advertising and environmental ethics. Nuclear bombs and modern symbolic logic. Darwin and art and how the brain works and it was all the same degree.
That’s a little explanation for my love of the “why”. It runs wide and deep. Why is this here. Why is it this shape, in this place, at this time. In tracking I am always skating between the known and the unknown. Being curious, and being methodical. Confidently working the puzzle, but reigning myself in if/when I get too rash or brash. Keeping an eye on my assumptions. Not thinking I have all the answers, but not getting so stuck in the questions that I can’t move forward.
Here is a short piece of an unfinished story. One of so many unanswered whys.
I came across this opening in the snow the other day. It is a small opening, in a grassy part of our property. I found it while following fox tracks, and was surprised by what I saw. Though it seemed to be a little hole for a little rodent, the fox tracks didn’t even seem to pause. Mice make up a good sized part of a fox’s winter diet. So why had this fox gone right past this hole?
Perhaps it hadn’t. Though both tracks had been made since the last snowfall, perhaps it was at different enough times that one wasn’t aware of the other. But also… why was there scat and urine at the opening of the hole? Isn’t that a bit, well, brazen? In a world so affected by smells, so full of critters who can and do literally sniff you out, why would you leave such a signpost on your doorstep?: “Here there be noms.”
I am not yet able to tell the difference between the tracks of shrew/vole/mice, unless there is some “gimme” to make it obvious. Like these wonderful gimme tracks in our woods, where the mouse very kindly left clear tails print in the snow.
So. Dang. Cute.
As I said, we have mice and voles and shrews here (at least). They each leave slightly different tracks and sign. For my money, this scat and tracks were a bit different than a mouse’s. Pushing us more into vole/shrew territory. Or some other wee rodent/insectivore I did not think to think of.
At left are the tracks and tunnel of our mystery critter. At right are tracks and tunnel of a mouse — note the tail marks and drag, not present in the tracks at left.
Maybe, I thought, maybe the fox walked past because it didn’t want what was in that hole. And maybe there is a reason the critter who made the hole wasn’t too worried about being found?
Shrews are small insectivores. They are similar in size and shape to mice, except with more of an anteater-style snout. They look a bit like a mouse that got its face stuck in a vaccuum cleaner. One day while out for a walk, I found a dead shrew in our woods. Specfically, and importantly, I found a killed but uneaten shrew in the woods. Before I learned more about shrews, I wondered why on earth critters would pass up a morsel of protein like that?
As is often the case, it’s because the critters knew more than I did. Apparently shrews don’t taste very good. They produce a potent venom in their saliva, making them one of those rare beasts: a venomous mammal. Though foxes and other animals will kill and sometimes eat them, they’re not first on everyone’s menu. And apparently that bite hurts. (Yes, even for us humans. Shrews are best left untamed.)
Like I said, I don’t have an answer for this particular puzzle. It might be a shrew, it might not. We just have some pieces and plenty of “whys”.
Alongside the “whys”, here are a few things we do know:
the scat was left, along with what appears to be urine, at an opening to a tunnel
the tunnel appears to be in the “subnivean” layer. Literally meaning “under snow”, subnivean is the area above the surface of the ground and below the surface of the snow. Mice, voles, and shrews all use this layer as winter habitat. (Once, on a a truly magical winter walk, I walked past a snowy spot where I heard some scurrying around. Still one of my favourite memories.)
Though the timing is a mystery to me, both this creature and a fox used the same area. Either the fox went through and then the little critter moved in, or the little critter was already there when the fox went through.
What happened when, and what that critter was… I don’t yet have an answer. I could have dug into the tunnel to try and find out who lived there, some trackers do. But my curiousity has limits, and digging up another critters’ home, to satisfy an idle “why”, is on the other side of them.
T.S. Eliot wrote:
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
I’ve always enjoyed that poem. But I think this short stanza is too long to happen within a human’s life. We’ll never meet the end of our exploring. The place is too rich, too full of mysteries, too full of whys. I’ll go back to where I started, and I will know the place a little better. But the exploring, that never ends.
So many snow stories in the stack! But we’ll go in reverse order this time — even if there are some shrew-d observations and im-possum-ble sightings that came before this one.
Today, tale of turkeys. Though not the *tail* of turkeys, just their footprints.
I’ve seen what I believed to be turkey sign in the woods a few times over the past weeks, before there was snow. Sizable areas of ground that had been thoroughly scratched up. But without tracks, I couldn’t be certain. There was one day where I found turkey scat inside the scratched patch, so that one was pretty conclusive, but the rest were conjecture. I love turkeys, and always like to see confirmation that they are around.
Scratched ground from turkey foraging at bottom of the image, tracks leading away up top.
Our first summer here we had a little turkey family who would pass through our yard like clockwork every evening. A bundle of baby turkeys, trundling through the yard alongside their adult protectors. It happened over a few weeks, and we got to watch those goofy little turnips growing up before our eyes.
Another summer, we had a large tom come and take advantage of a sand pile we keep in the yard near our firepit — he used it to have a truly epic dust bath. If you thought it was enjoyable to watch a tiny silkie chicken enjoying a dirt bath, you should see a tom going to town for his spa-day.
Our trail camera has managed to record turkeys in our woods a few times. Unlike the savvy fox and the skittish deer, turkeys give fewer bleeps. When we’re up there at the same time as a flock, and see them in person, they make a noise I think of as a turkey clearing its throat, and then everyone just walks a little faster and in the opposite direction to us.
From the trail camera, around 7:30AM on an October morning. There are at least two turkeys in this photo… see them both?
As I said, I love wild turkeys. Much like the chickens, I love that they have their own turkey agendas and they are just getting on with it. They have places to be and things to do.
Besides their overall temperment and interesting looks, here are three specific things I enjoy about turkeys: (1) you can tell the sex of a wild turkey from the shape of their poops; (2) they roost in trees; and closely related to 2, (3) wild turkeys can fly.
I don’t know why it took me until adulthood to learn that turkeys can fly. If you’ve only known “meat birds”, it’s a pretty easy fact to miss. The poultry we breed for eating has been thoroughly messed with. We alter not only their diet and the environment we force them to live in, but also the fundamentals of their biology. We’re so focused on forcing them to grow large amounts of breast meat, that a bird who should be capable of flight is grounded for the whole of its life, all for a larger portion of meat at Thanksgiving. Ugh.
How I learnt wild turkeys can fly, and that they roost in trees (don’t worry I’ll circle back to the poop bit) happened in an incomparably magical way. On YouTube one day, I stumbled across a video of turkeys taking flight, and was gobsmacked. The very next day, I went for a walk in our woods, and saw turkeys take off from our walking path and roost for the night in our trees. Now that is an immersive learning experience.
Though they don’t roost there anymore (that I know of), there were a number of evenings when if I went for a walk at dusk, and looked closely, I could spot turkeys tucking themselves into high branches for the night. For such large birds, they are surprisingly difficult to spot once they are still! Watching a wild bird settle into the branches of a tree for the night settles your soul.
Sweet dreams.
On turkeys’ more rambunctious side, I had another extremely memorable encounter, on one of those S’Marchy days in the seasonal borderlands between late winter and early spring. I was standing in our yard, making maple syrup. I heard some kerfuffling on the hillside, and looked up to see a gang of turkeys turkeying through the woods, headed my way. While I was recording them… well, see for yourself!
I like to think that turkey was trying to give me a high-five.
Last but not least, let’s talk poop. Scat is such an important part of tracking, and it’s wonderful to learn some of its right-in-plain-sight secrets.
Male and female turkeys leave different shaped deposits of poop behind. Male turkeys, “toms”, produce scat that is more of an “I” or “J” shape, while female turkeys, “hens”, poop more of a coiled or shapeless mass. It all has to do with their plumbing.
Here is a very good description of why:
“The quirk of clumping results from the fact that turkeys, like many birds, expel their droppings from a multi-functional orifice also used for reproduction. Separation of the terminal ends of their genital and digestive tracts just isn’t their thing. And that a one-stop shop is called a cloaca.
In female turkeys, the droppings exit the large intestine into the cloaca. Because this little corridor is large and stretchy (remember, it fits around their eggs as well), the droppings can curl and clump before finally exiting.
Male turkeys have a rudimentary phallus in their cloacas located near the tail end of their digestive tract. That means less space for the droppings on their way out — no wiggle room for coiling.
Why don’t all birds show this kind of sex-specific poop shape? In other species, like chickens, the males’ genitalia are further reduced, so their poops are less distinctive.”
So was it a tom or a hen’s track I was following in the snow, rummaging around the floor of our woods? Well here’s the “evidence” below. I bet you can tell for yourselves now, turkey trackers!
Is there anything more beautiful than a tea egg? Possibly… but in the moments I am gazing upon a tea egg, the answer is no. I mean look at it.
Beauty in the cracks
The first image up top is where I left the shell membrane partially intact — you can see how richly it shows the lines. But even fully removed, it’s strikingly geometrically randomly beautiful.
Low-poly egg
I use Signe Langford’s tea egg recipe from her book “Happy Hens & Fresh Eggs”. But you can find many other recipes online too. It’s essentially an egg steeped in a tea and spiced soy sauce mix, with the egg cracked just enough to let the colouring in.
In our life here we try to live closer to the seasons, which here often means “Kate is out following animal footprints in the snow again”. But while Snow Stories is a big part of any good winter, other kinds of making carry on.
Here is a little slice of the miscellanous making (like tea eggs) that add sparkle to winter’s darker days.
Bath Salts
Spring scents on snowy days
We ration how often we draw a bath here in the winter months. But it has been a mild and wet winter, and we’re not worried about the well, so a bath was on tap the other day (har har). But we were out of decadent extras to dress it up. Though a deep hot bath is a wonderful thing all on its own.
A number of years ago I adopted the habit of using “being out of X” as a prompt to try making it. Out of bread, try making bread, out of butter, try making butter, etc. So out of bath goodies… try making bath goodies!
I am as surprised as you are to find that we had everything we needed on hand. I have noticed this happen more and more often, as making projects dovetail one into the other.
I have been growing and drying flowers for a couple of years, not in ernest, but enough that I had a couple of jars already set aside for teas or destinations unknown. Apparently the destination for some of our flowers was a warm winter bath. Home grown and dried calendula, rose petals, and chamomile joined salts and oils in a homemade bath salt mix. Recipes are easy to come by — just look for a bath salts mix that takes advantage of something you might already have on hand (dried flowers, essential oils, etc). You can also make a very nice nourishing bath from oats. It all depends on what you have in your cupboards.
Nuts To That
There is no segue between a floral bath and a squirrel’s jaw bone, the next maker activity, except that both interest me, and both occupied some of my leisure maker time this January. Last year I was gifted a squirrel jaw and unattached teeth. (Some people really know me…) It was from a person who prepares skulls to use for educational purposes, and sometimes he ends up with a backlog to process. He offered it to me, when I lit up at the possiblity of trying to reassemble it: “Like a puzzle!”
This pretty little bowl was originally an incense holder, from the wonderful Art.27 in Toronto. You never know where repurposing may take you…
Though it had taken me over a year to pick it up and give it a try, it actually went incredibly quickly. Though it makes perfect sense, of course there is only one tooth that will fit in each spot. And even more so than with a puzzle, the small irregularities, the individual details, tell you exactly where each would fit. Roots that were longer or shorter, closer together or further apart.
He had actually given me more teeth than belonged to this jaw, having given me definitely the ones that fit plus any extra he had. I will set the extra aside for the squirrel tooth fairy (how cute would that coin be…).
The squirrel dentist will see you now.
Fresh Eggs, Fresh Pasta
Jaw reassembled, on to more maker activities. I always like to squirrel away a few extra staples here in the winter (there’s that segue…). In case of bad weather, or just the need for extra fuel on chilly days. We make most of our meals from scratch, and have replaced many of our basics with homemade recipes. Bit by bit the homemade list gets longer. It was not always like this — we used to live in a city where take-out was easier than grocery shopping, and small kitchen cupboards only held so much — but like any maker-ing, it’s all about practice, creativity, and diving in.
I don’t always make our pasta, but its a nice treat every once in awhile — especially when fresh eggs are available. Our “baby” hens have started laying, so winter eggs are on the menu!
You can find fresh pasta recipes all over the internet. My most important note here is that we don’t have a pasta machine of any kind, and it’s no problem. (I am a low-gadget gal.) I use a rolling pin and a knife to make ours, and it turns out just scrumptious!
Noodling around in the kitchen
If we made pasta frequently, I might get a roller, but if you just want to give a try, you don’t need any extra tools. I added oregano to this batch, because why not. A little nod to the green shell of the easter-egger eggs it’s made from. I made up half as noodles, and half for lasagna — for weeknight meals for just the two of us, we make little lasagnas in loaf pans.
Drop the Beet
We belong to a Winter CSA this year, with Footstep Organics. We are loving still eating seasonal local veg well into the winter. I’ve really enjoyed how it’s led me to think of root veg completely differently than I once did (there are many stealth veggies in that lasanga up there). I can sneak lush colourful roots into a surprising number of dishes. I recently made beet and carrot muffins, but below is a more traditional warm beet soup… though you’re not wrong if you think it looks like raspberry gelato.
I also recently popped all manner of winter veg into barley buddha bowls, where they paired deliciously with an indulgent avocado and a peanut-y sauce.
Pasta Sauce and Punch Lanterns
Every two or three weeks, I make a double batch of my family’s meat spaghetti sauce. Here it is just after I decided to add in some of the dried celery leaves I saved from last year’s garden. This sauce is the ultimate comfort food, and finds many homes here. We pop it into baked squash, topped with broiled cheese. Use it as a lasagna layer, or just nom it over noodles.
Making spaghetti sauce also means freeing up tomato tins, which means… making more tin-punch lanterns!
This one did turn out beautifully, but the simpler design of the first one I made was stronger when lit. For tomato can lanterns, simple is best! I use two cans per batch of spaghetti sauce, so our house should be very well lit by springtime. 😉
Oliver, always helping.
Sumatran Street Food
My favourite surprise kitchen experiment this month is definitely homemade martabak manis (following this recipe). I went to live and work in Sumatra for a year when I was 18, and flavours of Indonesia still taste like home. I have thought of martabak manis often, but have never thought to recreate it… until now. Though it is a street food, it turned out to be a very do-able if very decadent recipe for a home kitchen! I have a lot of room to grow in making it better, but wow was it ever delicious even on the first try.
I topped ours traditionally, which is to say, with everything. Chocolate, peanuts, condensed milk, and yes, cheese. It doesn’t sound like it will work but boy-howdy does it ever.
Good Fences, Good Neighbours
Now out of the house and up the woods. Stewarding our woods means maintaining healthy boundaries. Tracks in the snow showed that we recently had a bit of accidental trespassing by a friend of a neighbour. Though we cleared it up in person when he returned the next day, we did take the opportunity to “touch up” the fence.
We are fortunate to have good neighbours on all sides, but/and we each take different approaches to managing our properties. Some allow hunting, others gather firewood. Good fences help make it possible to ensure no one is stepping on anyone else’s toes. It’s a topic for another day, but what looks like great firewood to one person might be a snag full of cavities and nests that we are deliberately preserving. So a little work on the fence to keep things clear when we’re not around.
Attaching a strand of wire to one of the new fenceposts
Sweet Sour Dough
Back at the house, bread making continues. I woke up the sourdough starter again to make myself a loaf.
She was a real beaut! And you can aaaaalmost see the design I tried to slice in before baking. Getting closer!
Ciabatta Buns
And for Neil, lover of a good sandwich/burger bun, my first go at ciabatta. We’re already nearly done our second batch. This recipe from Ahead of Thyme is a winner!
This bun was responsible for hands-down the best breakfast sandwich either of us has ever had. Local cheese, local bacon (from Haanover View Farms), local spinach, very local egg, and the last of that interloping avocado — stretched into a scrumptious aioli.
Granola Bars
Sticking with the adage of try-to-make before you buy, I baked up a fresh batch of granola bars to fuel our woods walks, or just an afternoon of programming. I was lucky enough to find this great recipe very soon after I started making granola bars a couple of years ago. I use this Ina Garten version, heavily modified based on whatever I happen to have in stock (I also skip the sugar, and go a little lighter on the honey — and they’re still delicious!)
(Half-)Scottish Teatime
A recipe I definitely did not skimp on sugar was this Apple Gingerbread from our “Scottish Teatime Recipes” book. A $5 used book score from Samson Books that has proven to be just delightful. It doesn’t look like much, but when the syrup is measured by the pound you know it is going to be sweet. I can’t handle more than a few small bites, but Neil is very pleased it is here.
So that’s a sample of our miscellany of makering so far this January. I have a sort of feeling our next chat here will be back to Snow Stories. It seems im-possum-ble that I could stay away from talking about the animals for long… Hint hint. 🙂
Yes, this is a little bit about Covid. It’s also a little bit about wetlands and a little bit about snakes and a little bit about a dead rabbit in the road.
I have two bumper stickers on my car. One says “Please Brake For Turtles” and one says “Please Brake For Snakes”. While strangers often ask me about my turtle sticker — where did I get it, how they move turtles off the road, etc — the snake sticker gets no such love. Occassionally, it gets hate.
The other day, I had to pick up a package at the post office. When I came back to my car, there was an older woman standing at my bumper, shaking her head. She had come to the post office to pick up her mail. She went to get into her car, but as I went to get into mine, she stopped to call out, “The only good snake is a dead snake!”
It’s not the first time. I was still wearing my mask so I made sure my smile reached my eyes as I said, “Well I like’em.” She was not finished though. She explained that while she can see that I am a snake lover, she has a friend who has a snake and her friend is forever trying to get this lady to come over and see it. The woman was quite clearly afraid of snakes. But all she could express with that fear was snakes bad. I suggested that perhaps we could agree that snakes belong in the wild. Yes, she said. Snakes in the wild is okay.
The problem with this knee-jerk response, this good/bad animal dividing line, is that it ultimately threatens all animals, and especially there being any sort of “wild” left for any animal to be in. Grasslands with boardwalks on a sunny day are “good”, but not those muddy yucky wetlands in the rain. What animals know, what we humans seem perpetually unable to grasp, is that we are all of us wildly and deeply connected. On good days and bad. The aesthetically pleasing, and the challenging. Scavengers and carnivores and omnivores and carrion-eaters, up and down and side to side in nature’s intricate webs. In woods and wetlands and hills and grasses and streams and cities. It all exists together. We exist together. Or we don’t exist at all.
Covid has reminded us that our fate as humans is primally, internationally, inextricably, bound up in each other. That our choices can endanger or protect. It has also reminded us that we are a part of nature, and that we release our worries and soothe our stress by spending time in it.
Yet right in the middle of Covid, in the middle of one of the most stressful life events many Ontarians have experienced, Ford’s provincial government snuck through law that took away the ‘authority’ part of Conservation Authorities.
They literally made it easier to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.
“As one example of the consequence of this change, it is now expected that a development company whose owner donated thousands of dollars to the Ontario PC Party will be able to pave over a 57-acre lot in the Toronto suburb of Pickering that is under protection as a ‘provincially significant wetland,’ and build a distribution centre.”
Poor Conservation Authorities. On top of everything, they really suffer from a branding problem. Neither of the words that make up their name sounds appealing. While “conservation” is admirable, the word itself has strong conservative connotations. A sense of holding on to something, a stubborn unwillingness to move forward. With something good like, say, “development”. “Authority” is even worse. Humans have a natural resistance to too much authority. It sounds like the worst kind of unneccesary red-tape. Ugh, more authorities to go through!
(It’s an inverse case to how “landfill” uses its name to sneak under the radar as a not-really-so-bad a thing. It sounds like something that needs doing, doesn’t it? It was empty, and so we filled it. Well done us. Pass the disposable everythings.)
What Conservation Authorities do in practice is safeguard both the now and the future of our water, woods and wetlands — for you, for me, and for everyone yet to come. The habitat for both the turtles and the snakes. And the humans.
“While Canada holds 25% of the world’s wetlands, we have already lost 70% of them over the last century, due to human development. Often turtles are the biggest biomass in these wetland ecosystems. The loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems has unpredictable effects, but they are always negative. The web of life depends on all components, and just like in the game ‘Jenga’, a loss of a critical mass will lead to complete collapse. Why should we care about wetlands? Wetlands are essential for us as humans too! Wetlands act as the ‘kidneys’ or the filtration system of our water source- unhealthy wetlands means an unhealthy water source.”
It is not just the cute and the beloved that needs care, that matters. Just as it is not only the beloved grandmother we are trying to get safely to the other side of our tangles with this virus. It is also the vulnerable we see and don’t see. It is also the lady who wants to argue with me about snakes. The stranger I do not know may be the person who makes life worth living for someone else. I try hard to notice what I don’t see. To care about not only what is in front of me, what is easy. Out of sight out of mind. I succeed and I fail, but I try.
With the lovely and talented Tess Miller, at a Turtle Trauma Workshop at OTCC in 2019.
Leaving the post office, I took a quiet road home. Coming over a rise in the road, I saw a dead rabbit in the road. It had been hit by a car and was very dead. It was also very much in the road. Though being in the road was no further danger to the rabbit, it was not safe to leave it there. It can lead to future drivers feeling they need to swerve, uncertain what they are seeing. Tire tracks in the snow showed this was already the case. But it also poses a danger to the wildlife who will inevitably come to feed on it. The scavengers and carrion-eaters who each play their own role in nature’s web — not least of which, cleaning up our messes.
I found a safe spot to pull over, stopped, and moved the bunny off the road. Though that seems gruesome to some, it is a last act of caring. Both to show respect for the life that was lost, and giving a greater chance to the other creatures. The unseen creatures. The life in front of me, and the lives I don’t see. Snakes and turtles. The beloved and the stranger. It all matters.
The tracks I see most often in our woods are canid. A mix of fox and coyote. Well, the tracks I see most often are probably squirrels (eastern grey). But sorry little guys, while I enjoy observing your trails, I rarely spend much time trying to parse them. Rarely… though not never. As we’ll get to in a moment…
The outlier I’m always delighted to see are the mustelids: the weasel family. In particular, fishers. The mega-weasel. I see their tracks infrequently, and it is such a treat when I do. I love that there are fishers on our property.
This is a wildly unpopular opinion. Butpopularity is rarely my litmus test for worthiness.
My full rant is too long and too, well, rant-y, to insert here, but let’s just say there is no animal I give people a pass to villanize. It is too flat a vision of the world, too often rooted in a mix of ignorance, hearsay, and assumptions. There is no animal that deserves to be outright demonized for being destructive or taking more than it needs — and as humans we better take a dang hard at ourselves before laying down that judgement.
I nearly missed the fisher tracks this time — even though the fisher crossed the full width of the woods… twice. It was only in half-noticing that one of the squirrel tracks intersecting our main trail looked a bit extra “busy” that I discovered there was a fisher track mixed in. (See above: Ignore the squirrel tracks at your peril.) Larger five-toed* prints mixed in with the little squirrel ones. It was a galloping fisher! (*Note: the littlest toe often does not show up in fisher tracks.) Since I was sticking to our trail, and the fisher wasn’t, I nearly missed it.
Though I am not very good at working out the timing of a track, I still enjoy seeing the synchronicities. Below you see two visitors to our woods walking in parallel. I don’t yet know enough to know how long ago the tracks were made, or who walked through first, but side-by-side is how they lie now: a fox and a fisher, walking the woods together.
Here’s more of an aerial view so you can see everyone’s toes.
Fox at left, fisher at right.
And here, in one of my favourite bits of the track, a single tree is encircled — initially walking in the same path towards it, the fox goes around to one side, and the fisher to the other. Two roads diverged.
Fisher at left, fox at right.
Only to meet up again on the other side.
Fox at left, fisher at right.
Fishers are a good size, and have some fairly distinct gaits that show up pretty clearly in our woods. But in addition to the tracks themselves, there are the other cues to watch for. There is what the track looks like, its dimensions and spacings etc, but also where it’s going, and how it’s going there.
Galloping fisher
Following coyote here, I most often find they cross the property in fairly straight lines — often with another coyote a little ways off, walking roughly in parallel. The foxes go reasonably straight, but are also pretty likely to go exploring. Their trails wander more than the coyotes, the trail is often marked with their distinct scent, and I’ve found sign of them “tightrope walking” on fallen logs a number of times.
Check out that busy little rodent highway crossing the fisher tracks (the stippled snow on a diagonal)
As for fisher, I (literally) feel the pattern before I notice it — walking with my head down, I keep bumping my shoulders on trees. What seems to be a reasonably direct path is actually playing connect-the-dots: the fisher is choosing a path that moves from tree to tree. Fishers are great climbers, and squirrels are a major part of their diet. The fisher version of checking the fridge…
Take life one tree at a time fisher friend. See you again sometime.
Not at the same time of course. He* was long gone by the time I followed in his footsteps. (*I am calling the fox “he” for a reason, which I will get to.) But Neil and I often chat about how spending time with animal sign feels like time with the animal. Perhaps because you are so focused on its fox-ness. Everything but this fox is quiet. You are tracking this fox’s steps. Wondering what this fox was doing. When was he here and where was he going. Okay, he went here, and then here, but then where…. a-ha! over here.
It is a tremendous thrill for me to see the animals who live in or pass through our woods while they are actually in front of me. But what I love about tracks and sign is that I truly feel like I can take a lot of time “with” an animal, without disrupting it. I am not spooking its prey, or jeopardizing its chance at dinner. I am not causing it to waste precious foraged energy running from or avoiding me. It doesn’t need to worry about protecting its young from me. We can be together, apart. A healthy respect for the wild-ness of both its life, and mine.
They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
~Henry Breston
This fox started his visit to our home with a stop for a snack. He came down from the woods via a slope behind our house. The slope is a sort of overgrown garden that we still haven’t fully figured out. Perhaps it once had more form, but I believe it is mostly there as a berm, defending the house from the pressure of the hillside — being situated on a wooded hillside can put an awful lot of (literal) pressure on a house.
The “garden” slope has lots of brush and grasses, which I’m sure are full of all manner of things for a fox to munch on.
The fox, I believe, agreed.
Below is his first stop. A depression in the snow beside a grassy opening makes me think he stopped for awhile to hunt a mouse. Which is the inspiration for this post’s title — lifted from this fasinating article by NPR, exploring how foxes hunt (hint: it may have something to do with magnetics!), which is well worth a read.
Based on an extra footfall, and the indistinct shapes within the prints, I believe the fox then retraced his steps a bit, before continuing on.
Either just before or just after his meal, the fox marked his trail. Under this little cedar was a splash of pee. Usually it is not until I find urine with this distinct foxy scent, that I will confidently switch from “canid” to fox. As is often the case, I was initially following these tracks in roughly reverse order. So I was following “canid” tracks for quite awhile.
After the shrubbery was good and marked, the fox was off again.
From the “garden”, the fox moved on towards the driveway, making another marking pitstop along the way. Here is where I decided the fox was likely a “he”, based on the position of the feet and urine. Both male (dog) and female (vixen) fox will scent mark, though males are much more likely to cock their leg when they do so.
The fox went down our driveway a little ways, before I lost the trail. I then picked up a trail coming back up our driveway, on the other side. I believe this to be the same fox, based in part that we have seen fox do this in real time — they seem to think of “partway down our driveway” as some sort of boundary line …or at least as far as they get before they remember they wanted to check out our yard as well.
Some of the tracks coming back up the driveway were harder to find. There is a lot of “noise” at the top of the driveway. Plow marks, tire tracks, bootprints, and all the various activity under the birdfeeders. Can you spot the fox track in the bootprint below?
It’s right in the centre of the bootprint, with the toes aiming at the top of the image.
How about now? Sometimes using the spacing from a nearby track can help you find a hard to see print.
Enhancing the photograph to make the print more visible helps as well. 😉 But that’s not really an in-field tool (though I guess it could be…).
The fox then went behind the front garden, around the car tent, over to our walking path through the backyard. When they come through the yard, animals often follow our bootprints, and it’s a bit incredible how well their tracks can disappear into our trail.
Finally the fox went behind the chicken run (note: the chickens are just fine), before trotting away down the lower hillside, into the coniferous woods. There look to be many tracks down there, and perhaps I will go read some of those stories another day.
I hope you got your invisible mouse, little fox. And I hope to see you again soon.
The first of the real snowfalls last week. Which means the official start of one of my favourite seasons — tracking! When I get to go read the stories left behind in the snow, from all the critters who wander in the woods, while I’m being a human in our house.
While I can be a patient person, it would be a stretch to say it’s my default setting. Though I am reasonably good at waiting until the snow has actually finished falling before I go looking for tracks. Reasonably.
Worth the wait.
Not far along our main walking loop, I found deer tracks intersecting the trail.
How many deer do you see?
I love animal tracking for a host of reasons, but one is that it can be an exercise in reason. I once received a good piece of advice for drawing, which has proven useful in many areas of life: “Try to see what is there, not what you want to be there.”
I visit the woods to try and read the stories that are held by the snow, but I want to practice seeing what is actually there, not what I expect to find. That said, creativity and empathy are very useful tools in the tracking toolkit. Imagining what an animal might be experiencing, how it thinks, and what its motivations are, may help you follow its path.
While my brain might leap to all sorts of conclusions about what’s in front of it, I am most effective when I stop to separate the idea wheat from the chaff. I can form theories about the tracks I find, but I won’t hold on to them too tightly until I see corroborating sign.
In the photo above, there are tracks from three separate deer. There is a deer gait called a “pronk” or “stot” which results in a 2×2 pattern, which could theoretically explain the tracks on the left. But the spacing is wrong, and it also wouldn’t fit with the rest of the “story” — the tracks at right appear to have been made around the same time, but with a very different gait. I followed the tracks though until I found more clear sign that this was the story of not two but three deer.
Three tracks running parallel, travelling R to L — you can see the middle and lowest tracks diverging at the right of the photo.
I was nearly at the other end of our property when I found the first split, but there it was — the tracks separated out and divided clearly into three separate paths.
Here is what I feel pretty confident I read in the snow that day:
I was following the tracks of 3 deer, one notably larger than the other two.
The deer travelled through our woods sometime after 1:30PM on Saturday Jan 2nd, and before ~12PM on Sunday Jan 3. I based this on having walked the same area on the Saturday without seeing tracks, and that the tracks I found on Sunday early afternoon were partially filled with the snowfall that began midday. (Meaning the tracks had been made before the new snow began falling.)
The larger deer was much more likely to walk a little apart from the other two, which stuck very close to each other’s path.
The deer were aware of the route Neil and I had taken the day before, often following our steps. We often joke that we have to go up to the woods and do a lap after a snowfall, to open the trail up for the wildlife.
The deer entered our property from our neighbour to the east. They roughly followed the path on the southern edge of our woods, but they turned off the path to follow Neil’s trail — where he went the day before, to go look closer at the bark of a tree.
They traversed diagonally from Neil’s tree bark pitstop over to the western walking path, where they followed our footsteps until nearly back up at the north edge, when they turned and headed back east — crossing back into the neighbour’s woods.
Above are my tracks on the left, and Neil’s on the right. I am a little shorter than Neil, and scuff more. There are deer tracks mixed in.
For a long section, the deer followed the footprints on the western trail which Neil and I had left the day before. The deer occassionally switched sides, moving between my (left) and Neil’s (right) footprints. The two smaller deer mostly walked together. Below you can see one of the spots where the three distinct tracks separate, as they switch between which of our footprints they will follow.
Five tracks diverged in a snowy woods
Below is where the deer left our property, to go back into the woods of our neighbour to the east. This was actually where I began tracking, I followed the deer’s trail opposite to the direction they had been walking.
You can also see “neighbour sign” here — he has driven a lap of his woods since the last snowfall.
In collecting data, you see what you see, but you can also see what you don’t see. And what is in the negative space may be as interesting and informative as what’s in front of you.
Here are a few of the things I saw that I did not see:
The deer did not stop moving while on our property. They appeared to walk continuously without pausing to eat, rest, or investigate while they were here.
The deer were not “spooked” during their walk. Their gait did not change; they maintained a steady walk the entire time.
The deer did not appear to urinate or defecate while on the property.
The deer did not continue to follow the trail for its full loop. They turned relatively abruptly off the open double-wide walking trail to cut through the woods instead, and cross back over to our eastern neighbour’s property. They were very near the top of the hill when they turned, which is probably the area in the woods which smells the most like us — it’s where we arrive when we drive up in Evie, the EV.
Each walk when I see tracks is many walks in one. My own, and those of each of the animals I am following. The walks that preceded mine, though sometimes literally following in my footsteps. Stories all around. It can have quite a lot to say up there, even when it’s quiet.
There is a phrase — “soft fascination” — to describe the particular restful state we experience when we observe nature. My mind is more active while tracking than it is while softly fascinated by birds in the trees, or summertime ants busily doing ant things. Perhaps it is “actively quiet”.
How long was I up in the woods? I don’t know, I tend to lose track of time in my active quietness… but perhaps I could measure the depth of snowfall on my hat to find out. 🙂
A luna moth was the first moth I encountered here that blew my moth mind right open.
I saw it across the woods. Like so many curiousities here, nothing bold, just slightly the “wrong” green.
And I always investigate “the wrong green”.
The next was another Saturniidae, this time in its caterpillar form. A cecropia. Nearly the width of my boot at the toes. A great fat colourful beast of a caterpillar. Mesmerizing in its magnificence.
Most recently, you guessed it, another other Saturniidae. This time an Io moth. Being decidedly not “solely nocturnal”, but flopping around on our deck. I didn’t think it looked injured, and it got happily still once it found its way into the shade of the barbecue. It is hidden under there now, I’m guessing waiting quietly for night to fall.
What most captured me about the Saturniidae was not the magnficence of their size and colour and shape. But that the first thing I learnt is that while they have mouthparts, they don’t use them. Adult saturniids do not eat. So in their adult winged form, they live only for a week or two — off the fats they stored as larvae. “Adult behaviour is devoted almost entirely to reproduction”.
