Posts Tagged ‘paw prints’
Random Snippets
Oh my gosh, we must have a large wolf traipsing across our property! Wait. No, that’s Asher’s pawprint. Never mind.
The ground is thawing during the day, and what little snow is left is getting pretty soft. It refreezes overnight and leaves some perfect prints in the morning.
The fields are almost clear of snow now.
The warm weather has triggered some fresh raccoon activity, and Asher has figured out a family is living in a tree just beyond the edge of the yard that he can see out the bedroom door to the deck. Shortly after the sun drops below the horizon, he starts barking in protest of their existence. It goes on for a good half-hour while they busy themselves in full view on the branches up high doing whatever it is they do before setting out for their regular overnight routine. Fixing their masks, maybe.
I haven’t figured out where I put my new pruning saw yet. It wasn’t in the next place I thought to look.
In the category of things I can’t seem to finish after starting, I got out the trail cam recently and then brought it in because there were no new tracks, and the temperature dropped to insanely cold levels for days. Since then, there have been a lot of new tracks, and the weather has warmed dramatically, but for some reason, I can’t bring myself to set the camera back up.
Maybe that’s because I figure I’ll just get a bunch of pictures of the raccoons, and I’d rather not see how many there really are. Ignorance is bliss.
That bitter cold delivered the first significant crack in our once pristine new asphalt driveway that isn’t so new anymore.
It’s like getting the first scratch in a new car. You wish it would never happen, but you know it will eventually. Unfortunately, as soon as we got the first one, a second appeared closer to the house within a day or two. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Snippets, all of them. Random, too. Take that, Universe. It might even make sense if one keeps the bigger picture in mind. I don’t actually know. I just write ‘em.
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White Stuff
Overnight last night, we received more of that white stuff from the sky. Probably enough that I will feel justified in firing up the Grizzly ATV to plow the driveway. Our other grizzly took on a shocked look at the latest batch of precipitation.
Possibly because the earlier flakes got covered with an icy drizzle. It created a crust over the surfaces that was just enough to make walking annoying because it caught the toe of my boot every few steps. There are enough trip hazards in our landscape that I don’t welcome the addition of any more of them. I’ve noticed a demeaning increase in my tendency to hit the ground over the last few years when my foot catches on unseen obstructions.
For some reason, those occasions are matched by an equivalent increase in F-bombs taking flight in reactionary shock.
The horses look like they stood out in the weather all night and then rolled around to get as wet and icy as possible. There is probably a word for the blocks of packed snow that build up and then get ejected from the bottom of their hooves. They are scattered everywhere around the paddocks. The series of days with this slowly accumulating snow at the temperatures we’ve had seems to keep the conditions right at the level that is prime for these to form.
Asher and I picked a spot to position the trail cam (which has been in storage [with batteries still in it. Boo!] for too long), hoping to identify what animal has been using an old downed tree trunk in our woods for its toilet. My scat-identifying skills have me thinking it looks like either a human or a dog as big or bigger than Asher. In reality, based on likely creatures traveling in that part of the forest, it’s a coyote, fox, or really large raccoon. Whatever it is, the amount of scat reveals this is a regular occurrence and not just an animal that happened to be wandering past.
There were no tracks in the fresh coating of white stuff this morning, so I didn’t check the memory card for images. New tracks in the snow will tell me when it’s time to check. You can be sure I will provide a full report as soon as we get some results. Heck, you’d think the tracks would give me the information I need to identify the culprit.
I’m about as good at identifying paw prints as I am with scat.
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Paw Prints
As a result of the fraction of an inch of snow coating surfaces outside, we get new opportunities each morning to see where all the nocturnal visitors have tread around our grounds. The other day, I found some decent-sized canine prints on Paddock Lake that could easily have been a coyote passing through.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that the neighbor’s cat that practically lives on our property might be polydactyl. This morning there were some very clear prints on the driveway that revealed I was probably seeing double.
What I was seeing in most cases is the result of the hind paw landing in the same spot as a front one. When they don’t align so closely, it becomes much easier to see what’s happening.
What I haven’t been seeing in numbers like years past are hoof prints from deer. Maybe that explains why we saw so few hunters in the woods around us this year. No deer, no reason to hunt.
If the weather forecast proves accurate, we will probably lose what little snow cover we’ve got by the end of the weekend.
Then it returns to Asher being the only one to know where the critters have traveled in the hours before we show up on our morning walks. When tracks are fresh, he becomes maniacally obsessive about urgently following the scent. I don’t remember seeing “bloodhound” in the list of breeds identified by his DNA, but it sure seems like he thinks he is one sometimes.
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Circumstantial Evidence
We think we know what happened, but we have no proof. Today’s tale (no pun intended) needs to begin with a preamble that will put readers in a similar state of mind to the one I was in when I arrived at the shocking scene.
It was yesterday morning and I was walking Delilah like any other day. She sniffed at the typical spots and paused to take care of nature’s call twice, per usual. Our intermediate destination was the barn, to feed and clean up after horses, so I encouraged Delilah to turn onto the trail that most quickly brought us to the path around the back pasture.
Before we reached the last turn towards the barn, Delilah startled me with an immediate lunge off the path and made three strong leaps into a thick bramble of raspberry stalks and small trees before I could lock her leash and halt her progress. Every indication from her body told me there was a critter in the vicinity as she held her “High Alert!” stance and strained against the leash.
I froze with her and did my darndest to see any hint of movement from an animal intent on escape. Nothing. It wasn’t the first time she had what I consider to be a false alarm, so I pulled her back out of there and we continued toward the barn with both of us keeping a keen eye on the trees to our left for any movement.
It was while relocating equine fecal matter that I came upon the unsettling find.
There was a large chunk of hair matching the color of Swing’s tail laying in the snow. I immediately got Cyndie’s attention and she reacted with a level of shock that aligned with my concern. Upon finding footprints in the snow by the manure pile, I told Cyndie about Delilah’s behavior just around the corner by the back pasture.
It was adding up to an image of coyote activity to us. We immediately checked Swings over for any evidence of confrontation beyond the chunk of missing tail. Nothing.
However, based on the evidence thus far, I decided to take Delilah back out and let her pursue through the trees whatever it was she sensed from before. That quickly led to another finding, uncomfortably in plain view of our house.
If you can discern what that image above is showing, you will notice an impression in the snow where an animal curled up and laid long enough to melt a little bowl, just like deer leave behind, except there were no hoof prints around. Only paw prints. And there wasn’t just the one melted circle. There were clearly two on top of the knoll and possibly two others, less defined, to the side in the trees.
That is definitely what Delilah had smelled, but the culprits had long since moved on before we passed by the first time in the early light of dawn.
Just to add an exclamation point to the drama, last night after dinner, I called Cyndie over to ask if she could hear something outside. Was it a siren in the distance or yipping coyotes? She opened the door and confirmed, “Coyotes!”
“And they are close!”
What do you think? Did a coyote take a chomp of Swings’ tail Wednesday night?
I hope at least one of them has a black eye from the impact of a hoof.
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Several Impressions
A morning walk last Friday with Delilah on a trace coating of overnight snow and Cyndie’s tire tracks provided plenty of enticing opportunities to frame a variety of interesting views. Here are three of my favorite images selected from a much wider range of impressions I collected on that excursion…
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Mixed Tracks
The thing about aging, especially complaining about the less than glamorous aspects associated with it, is that there are always going to be people older than you for whom the whining will appear inconsequential.
“You think that’s bad, just wait until…”
We each have our moments in time. It’s natural to try comparing, but it’s also natural, to discount each other’s comparisons.
I used to be able to write my name in the snow when peeing. Now I just make Pollock style splatter painting designs.
At least I can still pee.
Speaking of tracks in the snow, I captured a cute combination of chicken traffic along with what I’m assuming were prints of a local prowling outdoor cat.
I’m not sure who was there first, but it is unlikely they were actually wandering around together.
If you pay close enough attention, you will see the tracks of the chickens are pointing in opposite directions.
I also think the paw print is a double exposure. It seems like too many toes, but I suspect it is a function of two feet being placed in the same spot.
Watching Delilah on walks, and often wanting to capture pictures of her paw prints, I have come to notice how often her back feet step in the same place as her front feet did. I think the cat was doing the same thing.
I am reminded of a snowy morning during my trek in Nepal when two of my travel mates were pestering the Sherpa guides to find us some tracks from an elusive snow leopard.
Eventually, (we think) they used the old trick of making some rather convincing prints in the snow with their own hands.
Everybody had a good laugh over it, although no admissions were ever offered, and a question over authenticity lingered unresolved. We were happy to imagine the excitement of what such evidence implied, if it had been real.
My mind has returned to my 2009 Himalayan trek because we watched a Netflix DVD last night called, “The Himalayas,” which dramatically told the story of South Korean climber, Um Hong-Gil, leading an expedition in 2005 to attempt recovering the bodies of three friends who died there a year earlier.
I find such expedition movies fun for the brief few minute glimpses they almost always include of the flight to Lukla, the swinging bridges, the rocky trails through rhododendron trees, the shrines, prayer flags, and initial views of Everest that are all the very places I walked.
Even though we weren’t on a mountain climbing expedition, those who were, traveled the same route we did, to get where they were going.
We all made mixed tracks in the snow on the trails.
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Relative Something 