Animals don’t cover their tracks.
Now that we have received a light snow, a trip around the yard reveals a remarkable range of activity that normally takes place when you are not looking.
Herein is a collection of a few tracks in the yard seen on walks yesterday morning and this morning.
The most frequently seen tracks in my yard belong to raccoons. Raccoons have a distinctive pattern whereby each side-by-side pair of prints shows one hind and one fore paw. In this picture, the hind paw, with its longer heel, is at the top, and the fore paw is at the bottom. Note the finger-like toes.
Another mammal that is omnipresent but rarely seen is the Deer Mouse. Named for the similarity of its colouring to that of the White-tailed Deer, this mouse has a sufficiently long tail that when it bounds across the snow, it leaves a tail mark. This is the short horizontal mark between the foot prints.
A striking thing about Deer Mice (and Voles) is that they make tunnels under the snow. These Deer Mouse tracks vanished into a snow tunnel.
which then proceded across the landscape.
I cannot be sure that the next picture shows vole tracks rather than mouse tracks, but there is no evidence of a tail dragging and the vole has a much shorter tail than does the mouse, so these are probably the tracks of a Meadow Vole. The animal is moving from left to right. It brings its fore paws down (the inner spots) and then its hind paws arrive overshooting the fore paws.
Yesterday, I went out expecting to find deer tracks everywhere; there were none. This morning, they abound. Clearly deer forage in different places on successive nights. As is typically the case, this deer left drag marks from not lifting its feet enough to fully clear the snow.
Of course, one sees birds. A staple of the region (or at least of my yard) is the Stellar’s Jay, the tracks of which are shown in this next picture.
There is no avoiding goose tracks. The webbing on the feet is clear here. It is interesting that these geese pick up and lower their feet so as to leave no drag marks (unlike the mallards, below).
The mallards, like the geese, have webbed feet. Apart from the tracks being smaller, they seem to differ in another way: Mallards seem tip their feet such that their central toe or nail can drag in the snow. So, the Mallard has a long drag mark from its front central toe and a slight mark from its rear toe. This Mallard is moving from right to left. The webbed feet are evident.
This leads one to this picture of Mallards landing and walking away. The birds flew in from the right. I suspect that it was the downstroke of their wings that produced the first mark on the left. I like Bill Baerg’s explanation of these marks (see, comments) better than what I wrote. Then there is the smudge where the birds skidded to a landing. This is followed by the two mallards walking away to the the lower left.
These are some of the things I see as I walk around my snow-covered yard.
Iconic birds
A news story surfaced this last summer about Nelson’s acquisition of a heron sculpture by Jock Hildebrand, an illustration of which appears on his website. When installed, it will join Nelson’s osprey sculpture and a heron atop a weathervane in Procter.
Procter already has its own heron sculpture atop a weathervane.
A recent article in the Nelson Post discusses the quest to pick a location for Hildebrand’s heron. A comment to this story, prompted me to think about the matter of birds as local icons. Claus wrote of “Denis Kleine’s realistic osprey in a nest on top of a wooden post [in Duck Bay]” and notes that “this in the osprey’s natural environment. While the osprey is iconic here—the heron is not!”
There is a good deal of truth in what Claus says: the osprey is iconic here while the heron is not. This made me wonder why that might be. Notice, he didn’t say the one was more common than the other, but that people have chosen the osprey as representative of the region. Why should they have done so? Why do we have such things as the Osprey 2000 (the Main Lake ferry), and the Osprey Foundation (a philanthropic organisation). Why don’t we have, say, a Heron Foundation?
The two birds share many characteristics: both are large, common, eat fish, and are frequently seen flying over the Lake or sitting atop pilings. However, there are differences that probably contribute to one having become an icon while the other did not.
Consider:
My suspicion is that the osprey became a regional icon largely as a consequence of our summertime enjoyment of beaches and boating when it is the more visible of the two birds. For the rest of the year when the heron frequents the lakeshore, people do not.
Actually, I am a great fan of each of these birds. Indeed, the Kootenay Lake website has a page devoted to pictures and a discussion of both the osprey and the heron. Further, I do find it appropriate to have sculptures of each in Nelson.
These musings suggest that we have chosen this icon more as a consequence of our own behaviour than that of either common bird. To round out this thought, I attach a favourite shot of each. To these, I added last Friday’s picture of a heron, merely to underscore just how common this bird is around here (and it also hung around for over an hour this afternoon).
I have taken hundreds of pictures of our ospreys, but this one with its wings outstretched while holding a sucker is my favourite.
I have photographed our herons on pilings, in trees, and while wading. It is less often that I manage a close shot of one in flight—but, this one was satisfying.
This was the second heron I watched last week. It stopped on a piling and watched for fish. The heron is one very photogenic bird.
