Idaho Hawk

I was in central Idaho helping out with a wolf tracking class this summer. We were walking a trail into the area that the local pack had denned earlier in the year when we came into a small meadow and spooked up this hawk. The meadow was covered in vole and gopher runs, good food for the hawk!

As best I can tell, it is an immature red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis).

Rattlesnake

By popular demand:



This was another find at Devil's Creek. Shortly after starting down the canyon, we passed an overhanging rock and I thought, "I wonder if there is anything under there?" This is the answer to that question.

Not a Dragonfly?

While wandering around Devil Creek I noticed this large (probably around two inches long) insect. While watching it I figured it was a type of dragonfly since it kind of had that look. You can also see that it had captured another insect and was eating it (something that dragonflies do).



However, once I got home and was trying to figure out what kind of dragonfly it might be, I noticed that its wings were folded behind its back. It is my understanding that all dragonflies rest with their wings out to the side.

Does anybody have an idea as to what kind of insect this might be?

Devil Creek

After visiting Alaska, we went down to Idaho for a short family reunion. It was quite an ecosystem change, though we managed to have a decent amount of rain while we were there too.

My dad took my brother and I to one of his old stomping grounds. He hadn't been there in 40 years though and a lot of the places he used to go don't exactly have well maintained roads. If you imagine sagebrush to the horizon and two shallow ruts through it (in parallel so you knew they probably weren't just cow trails) you wouldn't be far off. And that was when we were on even that much of a road. We did (just) make it though.



It was fun getting to see more of that country, and definitely not a place that an outsider like me would have been likely to find on my own. I enjoy exploring different landscapes: Seeing new plants and animals; imagining different stories on the land.

Up the creek a ways there were some shallow caves in a side draw. We wondered if it might have been a spot that had been used historically by Native Americans. I didn't see a lot of evidence of that, though there were some small obsidian fragments in a couple of places below the draw that made me wonder.

In the first cave I looked at I noticed a bunch of woodrat tracks and scat in the dirt. I also noticed that there were some dry sticks and vegetation sticking out from a ledge at the top of the cave. When I stuck my head up there a woodrat popped out! It didn't give me much time to get a look - it just jumped down and scurried back into a whole deeper in the cave. I think that was the first time I've ever seen one alive.

On the way out of the draw we saw this lizard - I believe a western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis). It was fun to slowly move up towards it taking closer and closer pictures until I had it more than full frame in the camera.



As we started back we noticed a smallish rain cloud on the horizon moving somewhat in our direction. By the time we got back to the truck it had begun to rain fairly heavily and the rain clouds at spread out about as far as we could see as we were driving out. It was fortunate we had 4wd because the ruts in the road quickly became little creeks and the soil turned to slick mud.

Track of the Week 19

You may have noticed that I have been missing a week a couple of times recently. I'm starting to run a little low on motivation and stored up track pictures and my camera is trying to make it to the shop (just saw to day that it was marked as "Undeliverable as Addressed"). But I had a request to keep it going for awhile longer, so I'll see what I can do.

Setting: Central Idaho, summer 2008

1. Who made these?

Pocket Gopher, based on the range maps in Peterson's Mammals, probably northern pocket gopher (Thomomys talpoides).

2. What are they (and how were they made)?

Possom59 got it right in the comments. These are eskers formed when the gopher makes tunnels in the snow and then back fills them to get rid of the the dirt from its underground tunnelling.

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Track of the Week 16

Setting:
This was taken last winter at the farm in southern Idaho.

1. Who is headed from bottom to top?

This is a relatively large bird with a game bird style track (with a short hallux and no significant webbing). It is a pheasant. I think chickens have similar tracks, but there aren't any chickens at that farm.

2. Who is headed from left to right?

These smallish, round tracks were made by one of the farm cats.

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Track of the Week 11

Setting:
Central Idaho, end of July 2008

1. Who?

These are badger tracks. When I first walked up to them, I thought bobcat because the foot morphology is pretty similar. Badgers do have a 5th toe that registers, but often faintly as there is just a faint impression in the front track here. The big give away that it isn't a bobcat though is the claws sticking way out in front.

The claws are easy to miss if you tunnel vision in close on the tracks, but once you see them there are very few options of animals around here that have claws that long. And badgers are the only ones that look at all like this.

Like most other mammals with long claws, badgers are avid diggers. They are members of the mustelid (weasels, otters, etc.) family though to my mind, they don't seem to fit in it very well.

2. Which feet?

A badger's front tracks are noticeably larger than their hinds. So we have a front track on the right of the photo and a hind to the left.

On badger tracks the inner toe is the smallest and does not reliably register. That and the shape of the front claw marks indicate these are the left side of the body.

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Track of the Week 4

Note:
I am changing the mechanics of this series a little. I'm feeling like the number of posts I've been making in this series is overwhelming my other posts a bit. Instead of having a separate analysis post I will put my answers inline on this post at the end of the week (with a little show/hide answer button so you won't have to see the answer if you don't want to). I've gone back and adjusted the previous couple of entries to work that way as well.

Scene:
We found these tracks in a dry (but still soft) mud puddle adjacent to a road at the edge of a forest and a meadow in central Idaho at about 6000 feet elevation.



Questions:
I suspect these tracks are going to be a little on the difficult side too. I'm hoping to stock up on some more interesting sets of larger animal tracks to mix in soon.

1. What groups of animals might have made these tracks (or which groups of animals do you think you can eliminate)?

If we make a very wide list, with this size range one might include medium-small rodents, weasel, mole and I think that is about it as far as mammals. The trick comes in considering non-mammals, so then we might add in birds, reptiles and amphibians.

I don't see how I could make those tracks fit into bird tracks though, so if we mark them off the list we are left with a set that is fairly reasonable to look up in a field guide.

2. Can you separate out fronts and hinds, lefts and rights?

The hind feet are the row of dots on the right side (relative to the picture rather than the tracks) of each track group. It's interesting to look at the feet of these animals and see where those dots are coming from. The three more finger-like marks are from the front foot.

Lefts and rights are pretty easy if you can tell which direction the animal is moving, and here it is moving from the rights side of the picture to the left.

3. What species?

These are toad tracks. I was thinking they were western toad because I didn't think there were other toads in the Pacific Northwest, but in a brief scan on the Internet it appears there may be other options there.

There were a lot of toad tracks and scat in that area which surprised me since it is fairly hot and dry with cold winters.

I don't have enough experience with frog tracks to tell you how they are different other than that frogs generally hop and toads generally walk (though both can do either).

4. Bonus: What made the pattern in the middle? How specific can you get?

I can't get very specific on this myself. Some sort of arthropod. I think it is interesting how it has quite a bit of bilateral symmetry.

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Grouse

These birds certainly earned their nickname of "fool hen". The first one I saw on the wolf tracking was silhouetted against the road a couple hundred feet in front of us. It stayed there in plain sight until we were within a few feet when it finally moved off the road towards its chicks. Of course we would never have known the chicks were there if it had just faded into the woods after it had seen us initially.

Two more times that trip I was alerted to their presence by either the hen or one of the chicks moving or clucking as I got close to them. That seems a bit more forgiveable since they were at least in the woods and difficult to see. They probably would have been better off if they were still and silent there though. It makes me wonder how they manage to survive, and also if they are more successful than I realize - perhaps I passed near many more grouse families without ever realizing it.



I was out in the cascades last week and we saw a couple sets of grouse there, the young seemed to be nearly full-sized, but had a bit of fuzziness on their heads still. Unfortunately I was unable to get any pictures as my camera battery had run down by that point.

I'm not certain as to which species of grouse this is, most of the pictures I found of various species that would be around here did not look quite the same, but my best guess at the moment is Spruce Grouse (Dendragapus canadensis).

Elk

There were a lot of elk where we were at in Idaho. Often while driving along the meadows in the early morning or late evening we would see large herds, some probably numbering more than a hundred.

One morning we stopped along the road to watch a small herd of elk in a meadow. Shortly they decided they wanted to move on and most of them ran off, but there was one young elk that was moving with a limp and seemed unable to move quickly. Not long after we saw it we noticed another young elk had come back and seemed to be keeping company with the lame one. A friend or sibling? We wondered if he would help protect the other until he recovered or if the injured one was destined to become somebody's dinner.



One evening a few of us took a break and went out scouting. On our way back this elk and another were out at the road looking at us. He ran off and came back a couple of times as we sat and watched. Often as he went to and fro he would have his head tilted up like this, I wonder if to help his sense of smell or as some sort of posturing? Eventually he went back to the main herd and we watched him run around. Most of the elk were calmly standing around grazing, but he would run back and forth between them full of playful energy. The ADHD elk of the herd.

Common Nighthawk with Babies

While Mallory and I were exploring our first day in camp she happened upon some common nighthawk chicks and their ma. They're cute little tykes and are well camouflaged. Can you pick them out below?



There mom was pretty well camouflaged too.



I was impressed by how wide she could open her mouth, particularly considering how small her mouth looked when it was closed.



She was clearly trying to distract me from the chicks but didn't seem to be working at it too hard. Perhaps she had somewhat given up since we obviously knew where they were. She stayed about 20 feet away from me and would move further away and act like her wing was damaged when I moved towards her.

More Wolves

After two days of having relatively fixed schedules, the students had the choice of getting up at 5am to go on "poop patrol" - driving the roads looking for fresh tracks and scat as well as live sightings - or sleeping in till 6. I think those of us who got up early (about half the camp) were not disappointed.

As I lay in my sleeping bag waiting the last couple of minutes before it was time to get up, I heard a strange noise. It was a low sustained tone, not quite like anything I'd heard before. It reminded me more of a canine howl than anything else I could think of, though it crossed my mind that it could be somebody's stupid idea of a wakeup call. Whatever it was it got me up out of my sleeping bag quick. I went down to the gathering area where I joined a couple of people discussing it in hushed tones as it continued. From there it was easier to tell that the sound was coming from across the meadow, probably up the hill across from our camp. The noise continued for 5 or 10 minutes, with occasional changes in tone and breaks. A couple of times in the distance behind it we could hear what sounded even more like wolves howling in apparent response.

I had never heard a wolf howl in the wild before, and this sound didn't exactly match what I have heard in the movies, but I couldn't think of anything more likely. Elk and owls were suggested as possibilities, but just didn't seem right to me. Plus I really wanted it to be a wolf.

The poop patrol was relatively uneventful, I think we saw some elk and fresh coyote tracks, but not much we hadn't already been seeing. After finishing the patrol circuit we had a little breakfast than split up into our groups for the day. My group started by driving down the side road across from camp where we quickly stopped when Dave saw wolf tracks going down the road.

We had seen a few sets of wolf tracks earlier in the week, but they had been somewhat old when we found them. Often when tracks are fresh they will be a different color than the surrounding dirt, this effect lasts a bit longer in the early morning, but the color difference quickly fades as the sun comes up. These tracks had color in them and were probably no more than a couple of hours old, and were coming right down from the area we heard the noise. Meaning that quite possibly we had heard this wolf howling up on the hill two hours previous.

I imagine that everyone was pretty excited, but it is hard for me to tell because I was so excited myself and was very taken with following the tracks. Several of us started trailing it forward and another group started following its back-trail. It wasn't long before we lost its forward trail in the woods so Mallory and I took the van to cut for the trail along the main road in the direction it had been headed. It took us a little while, but we eventually picked up the trail again, got out and started trailing it some more. This road was more exposed to the sun and the color was fading quickly. Unfortunately we couldn't both just keep on the trail, the rest of the group needed to be picked up. I decided to let Mallory stay on it. After checking in with the group on the radio I jogged back to the van and drove back to the intersection of the roads thinking they would be there soon. I was mistaken.

It was several minutes before they even came into sight down the road. It was a delicious agony having to wait, with the excitement and potential of a live trail bursting in my mind. I paced, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until they got there. Eventually we got back to where we picked up the trail and again started trailing. We followed it much further this time, but again it disappeared into the woods. After cutting for the trail along another side road, most of the group decided to go back and further investigate the trail before we lost it and look around more for it in the woods. A few of us decided to continue down the main road looking for tracks though, and probably a mile or two down the road found a few more prints that were probably part of the same trail. It was getting late in the day though, and between the sun and traffic we didn't have much success in staying on it. After a bit the rest of the group picked us up and we drove down to a river and had a relaxed afternoon exploring that area.

We were a little late getting back to camp that afternoon, but the other group was not back either. When they did get there they also seemed to have had an exciting day. They were coy though, having decided not to share their story until the whole group gathered in the evening. And so I guess I will wait till next time to go into their day...

Wolf Tracking

I was excited to get the opportunity to volunteer with Wilderness Awareness School's summer wolf tracking program. I wasn't sure what to expect other than that it would be an incredible time. I was hoping to see wolves, I certainly didn't expect to though - I wasn't even certain I would get to see any wolf tracks.

I went out to the site in central Idaho with a few other staff members several days before the class started. We split our time between getting camp setup and scouting out the area to see what was around. There was a different dynamic when it was just us staff then when the students were there, and I loved them both. With just the staff we would get up early and drive the main roads through the meadows looking for animals and watching for tracks in the dirt, sometimes repeating the process in the evening. During the day we would work on camp with breaks for a little more exploring.

The weather was incredible and continued to be so throughout the week. The temperature was probably in the mid 70s during the day, perfect for walking around or taking a dip in the (a bit cool) creeks. At night the temperature would drop maybe into the 30s (there was frost in the meadows but not in the woods) which kept the mosquitoes down at night.

There were a lot of animals with babies around, I'll be making posts about some of those later, but two of the more prevalent such animals where the sandhill cranes and the elk. The young elk were already pretty decent sized and were often visible with the cow elk (and occasional bull) in the meadows. I didn't actually see sandhill crane young (one of the students said she almost stepped on one before she realized it was there and quickly backed away), but the adults were regularly visible and audible in the skies and meadows.



I am not generally an early riser, but somehow when I am camping out it is easier for me. Over the week I don't know if slept in past 7 and most days was up at 5 or 6. Sometimes we had the option of sleeping in a bit longer, but I always chose the earliest option because I didn't want to miss anything! there were always more animals out early and even if there weren't the sunrise was spectacular. It was just great to stand there eating breakfast at the edge of our campsite, looking out over the meadows, mist hanging above the creek, a sliver of moon not far ahead of the orange preceding the sun over the hills.

One morning the early risers also heard something pretty cool, but I'll leave that for another post...