March Tracking Club Mystery

This March's tracking club may have had the best tracking club weather of the year. We got out to our meeting place with the sun beginning to rise over the horizon and the spring colors (particularly the budding cottonwood leaves) were gorgeous in the early light.

There was a lot of coyote, robin, deer, hare and mouse activity evident in the sand. There was also a partial answer to a mystery I have been holding on to for awhile:

Two years ago during the spring we found a lot of little digs at the sandbar, but we were unable to determine what had made them or why. One of the nice things about going to tracking club on a monthly basis is getting to know what is normal. We did not remember seeing digs like those in previous months and they didn't show up in later months either. Were they specific to that season or did we just not pay enough attention other months?

I recently found a journal entry I had written about the digs and I have been looking forward to getting out this spring and seeing what might unfold with this mystery. Was it a one time thing? Would they show up again at the same time of year? Would there be any clues as to who left them and why?

I was not disappointed. We got out to the sand and there they were! Though not as many of them as I think there had been the previous year. Perhaps the digging behavior hadn't been going on as long yet, which is interesting because this was the third Saturday of March and according to my journal it was mid-February when we found the digs before. Considering how warm the winter has been, what factors might have made the occurrences later this year?

This year there was a clue to their identity. The condition of the sand was such that we were able to easily see deer mouse tracks (often the sand is too damp for their tracks to show up much). Around several of the little digs a lot of deer mouse activity was in evidence and I saw no evidence of other animals of the appropriate size near those digs. So it seems likely that deer mice were doing the digging, but there are still a lot of questions remaining for my mystery.

Growth of a Fungus: a Puzzle

I went out to a friend's neighborhood to look around in the woods for signs of wildlife. The housing development is right next to large forested areas and there have been problems with bears raiding garbage so she is interested in helping her neighbors be more aware of the animals around them - hopefully with increased awareness will come increased responsibility.

While on our wander through the woods I noticed this bracket fungus with an alder stick going through it a little more than an inch in from the edge. The stick was detached from its tree, but was still fairly firm with much of its bark remaining. Fallen alder branches seem to rot fairly quickly in our wet northwest winters, so I suspect that this branch had fallen since last winter. It was quite firmly encompassed by the fungus though. I have never seen anything suggesting that a shelf fungus would grow so quickly to engulf the limb like that in less than a year. The only alternative that comes to mind (which also seems unlikely to me) is that the stick remained upright and in sturdy condition for the years it might take the fungus to grow that much.

Any ideas?

Large Mystery

The trouble with planning to spread out several posts is that sometimes exciting things happen in the meantime and derail the schedule. We'll see if I get back to posting about my trip later.

For now I will tell you about some exciting things I saw while doing a transect for the Cascade Wildlife Monitoring Project up on the Snoqualmie Pass. I'm pretty sure we found marten tracks, but they weren't particularly clear tracks and with my lack of familiarity with them I'm not 100% confident of declaring them such without further consultation with someone more knowledgeable. There were also a couple of interesting small rodent mysteries that I may post about another time. But what I'm going to post about now has only become more mysterious for me as I continue to investigate it.

I found this set of tracks - apparently coming from a wooded area, going through a clearing and disappearing as it got to a stream bank. Tracks that large are generally of interest on the transect (and for me personally), so I was excited to check it out with the team. But not having all day to look at the tracks (having already spent a lot of time looking at what we believe to be marten tracks and still having another transect to complete) we took some pictures and measurements, discussed our thoughts and moved on.

There is a pretty clear pairing of tracks except in a few anomalous sets. I didn't think about it too much at the time, but because of the pairing had figured the animal was moving in an overstep trot. When I returned the next day I was a little shocked to realize that was probably not the case - that the anomalous sets suggest that all the other tracks were directly registering. That leaves me questioning which gait the animal was in let alone figuring out what animal it was.

If you have any thoughts or questions please post a comment. I would really like to figure this out as well as possible.

There wasn't much detail in individual tracks, but what there was looked mostly like this:


(the dark rectangle at the right is a ruler that is a bit over 15cm long)

When I measured the individual compressions I measured the whole way across since there was not enough detail to determine a true track. Also consider the likelihood that there were actually two feet landing in each compression. The individual tracks I measured were in part of the trail where the animal was moving somewhat slower then the speeds it later reached.

In the section of the trail where the first picture below was taken, lengths were from 11.8 - 13 cm, width from 12.5 to 14cm and the trail width was 18 - 24cm. The trail narrowed even more where the stride increased (as in the second and third gait pictures).

Most of the trail looked like the first two pictures below with what looked like a side trot or 2x2 direct register gait. However if you look at the third picture (or towards the background of the first two) you can see that sometimes there is an "extra" foot that would seem to rule out a side trot. The tape measure in the pictures is out to 6 feet. I will give some measurements of the tracks and gaits below the pictures.

Looking back the trail

Up the trail

Up the trail

Strides (assuming a 2x2 lope) were 84, 94, and 71cm in the slower section and when it sped up were 109, 112, 127, 109, 102, 105cm. The 112,127,109cm section was where there was an additional foot registering.

Group lengths were 46 and 54cm in the slower section and between 54 and 75cm in the faster section.

One further detail to be considered is that one of the extra feet, presumably a hind since it was the last in the grouping*, broke through and the hole was around 5cm across (I believe the compression in the hole was a bit larger than that though.)



So is it in a 2x2 lope, a direct register walk/trot with an odd pairing of tracks (a limp perhaps?), two animals travelling almost exactly in the same tracks, something else? Why does the track that breaks through not break the top out of the hole when the foot goes forward (perhaps the snow was to firm for the relatively lighter pressure of the exiting foot to break it)? And who was it?

*It is my understanding that oversteps are more likely to occur than understeps for most animals, particularly as the animal goes faster. Additionally there is some obscuring of the front track by the following track suggesting that the second track was made after the first one.