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A Path to Nature in Your Life
There is a rich variety of experiences that are available to us only in winter. Here is Dave's suggestion for an adventure you can embark upon after a snow!- Editor.
White tailed deer prints. Photo credit: Dave Santillo
Winter Tracking
One aspect of getting more from nature is increasing ones awareness, observations skills, and understanding. Digging below the surface layers, nature reveals many secrets and insights that help to increase ones understanding and enjoyment. To do this, it’s sometimes necessary or useful to approach things from a new perspective.
Winter proves and exceptional opportunity to do just this! Observing wildlife almost always requires patience, understanding of a bit of animal behavior and habitat so that you know when and where to look, as well as a little luck. Even then, wildlife observations often are fleeting glimpses. But SNOW changes everything! Wildlife tracks in snow leave a testimonial of where they went, what they did, how long they stayed, what caught their attention…and provide an opportunity to read and reflect upon the stories they leave behind.
Many of the activities we enjoy outdoors during the winter involve moving fairly fast, and or reliance on trails. Cross-country and downhill skiing, snowmobiling, winter climbing – even folks who snowshoe often restrict themselves to trails. Representative of so much we do in life, winter activities rarely seem to involve moving slowly and taking it all in, or stopping to watch long enough to gain new insight. Following tracks and learning from them will require thoughtful investigation, and slowing the pace of your activity so that the lessons can develop and be absorbed.
So many tracks to follow!
It’s no mystery that wildlife trails often intersect our “human” trails. What does this offer us? Well, for most people who stop to look, it offers an opportunity to practice identifying the track. And then, for most people, it’s onward down our trail, to get a little more distance in!
But, now here’s the part that requires a leap of faith…what about LEAVING the human trail and following the animal tracks?! This opens up a whole new world of discovery, insight and learning into nature. By leaving the human trail and following the animal trail, your entire perspective will change. You leave your world, and immediately enter theirs…an amazing change of awareness and perception that I guarantee you will sense. Similar to entering a different dimension, you have to accept that you don’t know where you are headed and how long it will take, or how you’ll get there. It’s quite a different experience from clutching a folded trail map.
All that’s really needed is a dusting of snow but it becomes more adventurous when there’s deep snow, and you get a chance to strap on snowshoes. One of the great things about following tracks of animals off of human trails is that you yourself also will be leaving tracks. There is little chance of getting lost since the option is always there to just turn around and retrace your own steps.
There’s a large laundry list of things to look for and countless mysteries to unravel when tracking wildlife all of which adds up to a great Natural History Journal adventure. The first task, of course, is to obtain the tools needed to identify the track. There are plenty of good animal field guides available, and many have sections devoted to tracks. Tracks are readily identifiable based on shape, size, and pattern of the footprints. After you identify the species, study the track for a moment. Look at the direction and course the animal is taking (straight vs. wandering). If it’s a relatively straight path, chances are it was moving from one area of its territory to another, with a destination in mind. If it’s wandering, it could have been foraging for food. If there is an impression of its body in the snow, it may have bedded down, sunned itself, or taken shelter there. For deer, nighttime “bedding” areas are often in and under conifers, which help insulate from the cold. Daytime beds may be in open hardwoods on south facing slopes that face the warmest sun.
Look for evidence it avoided human activity. Did it give a wide berth to a back yard, or to a road? If so, maybe it traveled during the day when “diurnal” humans are most active. Did it ignore the yard or road, or maybe even head directly for it to feed on someone’s crabapple tree or juniper shrubs? If so, the track was likely made in the nighttime.
Evidence of a grouse's landing!
Is there any evidence of what the animal was doing? Do you see any evidence it scraped snow away to get at something on the surface of the ground under the snow? Is there an oak tree above that might have dropped some acorns? Turkeys commonly do this, as well as gray squirrels. Is there evidence the creature stopped to browse on shrub and tree buds, like a deer or rabbit? Any tree or shrub with fruit still on the twigs is bound to be a magnet of feeding activity. When you see feeding activity, try to identify the species of vegetation. There are some great field guides to winter identification of woody vegetation based on bud and twig form and arrangement.
Every time you note an activity of a particular animal, take a look at the vegetation (habitat) around you. Record it in your journal. When you build up a number of encounters with the same animal, and have a number of different “data” entries, see if you can relate the activity to a certain type of vegetation (shrub, mature forest, coniferous or hardwood forest, field, and so on).
Turkeys making tracks! Photo credit: Dave Santillo
Animals that are fairly active and common in New England include white-tailed deer, gray and red squirrels, wild turkeys, ruffed grouse, deer mice and white-footed mice, snow-shoe hares, eastern cottontails, red fox, and coyotes. There’s also the chance to see the tracks of some less common animals like porcupines, mink and weasels, river otter, fisher, pine martens, and maybe even a bobcat if you’re lucky!
Some subtle tracks to look for:
Look for the delicate wing prints where a songbird landed on fresh snow, and took off again.
Search for the telltale signs of a deer mouse with two footprints next to each other every few inches, and a continuous line where the tail dragged along.
See if you can find the wandering medium-sized bird prints of a partridge walking in the woods, and in rare cases, a spot where it burrowed into fresh snow to take shelter on an exceptionally cold night.
Those with GPS units can add another dimension to their experience. Click your GPS unit on at the start of your journey, and then head off with on the animal trail. At the end, you’ll be able to overlay the location of the track onto topographic maps or aerial photographs. This visual record provides an interesting perspective that’s difficult to grasp while walking on the ground. Once you’ve plotted your points on a topography map, you can see where the animal went, and how much meandering it did, as well as how much ground it covered.
A word of caution: remember that winter can be a stressful time for wildlife in terms of meeting their bodies’ demand for energy, so you should use good judgment in your tracking. If the snow is over two feet deep animals like deer and turkeys often restrict their movements. You don’t want to get so close that you startle the animals into having to expend energy to get away from you. In more northerly areas of Maine and New England, deer often congregate in or around deer wintering areas or deer concentration areas. These often are areas of fairly dense conifers that offer protection from winds and extreme cold; the conifers also intercept more snow, so depths on the ground can be somewhat less. But these areas also provide less food, so if the animals are in this type of habitat, they likely are stressed. It’s not a good idea to track in these areas. As a general rule of thumb, I suggest that if you see the animal you are tracking up ahead, stop, look, admire and offer some appreciation and then turn around and head back, either to continue your adventure on another set of tracks, or call it a day, satisfied that you scored a big prize!
Winter tracking provides an excellent opportunity to “get inside” the life of wildlife species. It’s an adventure to take you outside of the human perspective and launch yourself into the world of animals.
Snowshoe hare prints
-Dave
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Dave Santillo, Ph.D. is an outdoorsman, naturalist and adventurer who delights in approaching his relationship to nature from a variety of physical, spiritual, recreational and educational perspectives. He has a Ph.D. in Environmental and Forest Biology and lucky enough sto take part in a wide variety of studies of wildlife, fish, plants and insects for over 25 years in his professional life.
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Here are a few suggestions that you might find useful in your tracking adventures:
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mammals
Field Guide to Tracking Animals in Snow
A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs: Northeastern and north-central United States and southeastern and south-centralCanada (The Peterson Field Guide Series)
Trees of North America
Have a wonder-filled journey outside and send us your tracking adventure stories! editors@spiritliving.org.
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