Snow Days

It snowed here Wednesday night. I was grateful to have the opportunity to get out on Thursday and explore the tracks left by whatever happened to be about (after having wasted the chance last time it snowed here).

I had heard that there were weasels and rabbits up by the Woodland park zoo so I figured it would be a nice idea to walk along Green lake and then up towards the zoo. I live near the northeast corner of the lake so walked around the south end and up through the park.

I was a little surprised to see raccoon tracks walking along the edge of the northeast corner of the lake. They went for a ways, then disappeared (it was hard to follow tracks in most places because of the high human and dog traffic) about the same time that some other tracks - possibly rat - began. In looking through my field guides rat seems to be the right size for those tracks, but I am suspicious because they were bounding the whole time (a pretty good ways) and I don't think bounding is the normal gate for rats. Another possibility is squirrel, but I we mostly seem to have larger gray squirrels around in the city rather than the appropriately sized douglas squirrels.

Another set of tracks that surprised me were the coot's. I expected that I might see some, but I did not think the tracks would be so large. I guess large feet might be an important adaptation for them since they are in the water so much and don't have webbed feet. Bird tracks are still pretty tricky for me. There were also a number of what looked like corvid tracks, which I guessed were jays because of their size. Megan asked, "Couldn't they be crow tracks?" But I didn't think so because I was pretty sure crow tracks would be larger - they aren't. We later passed some crows and the tracks they left were the same size.

As we got toward the southern end of the lake we saw more and more rabbit tracks. We continued on up into Woodland Park where rabbit tracks continued to be numerous. We also kept an eye out for weasel tracks, but didn't find any. Unfortunately it was quite cold (probably would have been fine if it weren't for the stiff, cold winds) so I was not too inclined to go digging around more seriously for weasels.

I went over to Ravenna park today which is another of my regular nature spots, but it was pretty well tromped by the time I got there. The only non-domestic tracks I saw were from grey squirrels.