Riverwalking

Today I went tracking on the middle fork of the Snoqualmie with Mallory. Our stated intention was to walk down the river (a few miles to a bridge), but the weather was overcast (the day before when plans were made it was sunny out) and there were tracks to be seen. I think the temperature was around seventy degrees which was plenty warm for what we did, but would probably have been on the cool side if we had walked more along the river like we had planned. The water itself was a bit warmer than last time we went, I think in July.

We didn't find track and sign of as many mammal species as last time, but we still saw quite a few and had several interesting groups of tracks to investigate. We came down off the road near a little creek which a short while later merged with the river. It took us awhile to go between the small beaver dam a little ways up the creek from the river all the way down to the river. How could we avoid investigated each little patch of mud? We found jumping mouse tracks, beaver tracks and along each little mud bar in the creek there was a line of otter tracks. (There were also tracks of a few people and a dog or two that had been through as well as the deer and elk tracks which were common everywhere we went.)

I was also side tracked by a red legged frog. In fact I found two which appeared full grown to me, one of them had a broken hind leg and had a lot of trouble getting around. I felt bad for him, but after taking a few pictures, left him be. I suspect he will end up somebody's meal before too long. We saw quite a few amphibians today, most of them were tiny - both red-legged and pacific chorus frogs. In a side pool near the mouth of the creek there were hundreds of large tadpoles, some seemed as large as the little frogs we saw hopping around. I hope that they aren't bullfrogs - I haven't seen or heard any up there yet. On the way back I also found a western toad which seemed to have dug itself a whole to hunker in. I inadvertently scared it away (it swam down the creek into the river - hope it is okay as it seemed to have some trouble swimming against the current) so I took the opportunity to check out the hole. It was deeper than I expected - longer than my fingers, but when I dug in only another inch or two further, so probably around 5 inches total.




When we finally reached the river we found some bobcat tracks that seemed fairly large as well as some cougar tracks, all amongst the fishermen, elk, dog, etc. On the other side of the river is an area Mallory refers to as bobcat pond, though today it seemed to be everything but bobcat pond. More cougar, elk, deer, raccoon, but no bobcat.

We walked down the river a bit further and decided to cross back over to the other side where hunger took hold and we stopped for lunch in an area covered in raccoon tracks. I'm curious why the raccoons seemed to like that area so much more than the other areas we went through. I also saw a couple of bright caterpillars. One was large and bright green with little yellow dots in rows along its side. For some reason it was crawling across some rocks in the open. The other I found on my backpack after I had left it lying on the ground for a couple of hours out in the middle of some other rocks. It was small and bright orange with some wicked looking hair like protuberances.


That section of land was as far as we would go. We spent a bit of time investigating beaver tracks, trying to determine where the toes lie on the hind foot. Often only two or three toes show up in the hind track of a beaver and for some reason, even when the foot was showing up well in deep silt, often there would only be four toes showing up clearly.

Shortly after the beavers we hit on the main attraction of the day. Two parallel cougar trails through the muck. They seemed to be different ages and were definitely different sizes. Though the tracks were fairly old I think they had both been within the past couple of weeks because they didn't seem to have been rained on significantly. We spent awhile discussing the characteristics we thought might help us determine which sex they were but did not come to any conclusions. One of the trails had tracks that splayed to 4 and 5 inches. On our way back we also noticed cougar tracks in a couple of places we had missed them before. It seemed strange that with as many tracks as we saw we did not see any cougar scat.


On our way back we discussed whether on deer and elk the inner toe or the outer toe is longer/further forward. Our observations suggested that which was further forward was pretty variable. The slippery mud may have played a big role in the inconsistency. The tracks also sank in pretty good so it was difficult to determine which was longer. In general they seemed quite close to the same size. In Mammal Tracks & Sign Elbroch says that the inner toe is slightly smaller (looked up after returning home).

Just before our last river crossing on our way back we saw a nice trail of mink and a number of rabbit tracks which were in the size range for cottontail or snowshoe hare, and which we suspect were snowshoe.

There were a number of other delights during the day. I found some stonefly larva husks; some pebble casings out on a rock in the middle of a river - wonder if they are from caddis fly larva, though the caddis fly larva I noticed moving around were covered in twigs and were in slow moving water; and some reddish brown growth which I suspect was a fungus of some sort and which put out an amazing amount of spores.