Bike Ride

I am still planning on getting to some posts about the wolf tracking trip soon, but I had some cool experiences while riding my bike recently and I still have some work to do with the photos I took in Idaho.

I've ridden my bike along the Snoqualmie Valley Trail where it goes near by Fall City a couple of times this past week. The first ride I went up to the bridge going across Tokul creek. It was quite pretty with the sun going down on the horizon, the bridge high above the creek, but with sizable trees reaching up above the bridge. On the way back I heard some sort of animal call - I suspect an insect - at several places along the trail. The rhythm of it reminded me of a chickadee call, but almost toneless and coming from fixed places, the closest one I heard seemed to be on the ground.

Today I rode north towards Carnation. On the way back I stopped and watched a couple of 4-point bucks eating apples on the edge of a field near some houses. One of them seemed much more cautious, it looked in my direction for quite some time (there was a row of trees and shrubs at the edge of the road between us so I think it was difficult for them to see me clearly) while the other continued to eat.

A ways back up the road a decent sized black bear popped out onto the road ahead of me and loped along for maybe 100 yards before looking back to see if I was still coming, then heading off up the hill next to the trail. It had come out of the woods next to a large meadow, I don't think there were any apple trees down there, but there were quite a few blackberries brambles which seem to just be coming into their prime around here.

Maybe I'll keep up the bike riding.

Intersection

I thought this was fun with the three different species all in one spot (it may be a little difficult to see the mouse tracks without clicking the image to enlarge it).

Bears

It didn't take too long before we came upon these bear tracks on the beach. It appeared that there were a couple of different ages of tracks and they wandered up and down the beach quite a bit. We figured it (and pretty much everything else around) had probably been partaking of the abundant herring eggs on the beach.



It put its dirty feet up on this snowy log. This is the front right foot - unlike us, a bears largest toe is on the outside and smallest on the inside.

While there are only brown bears in the Sitka area, even if that weren't the case it is possible to tell that these are brown bear rather than black bear tracks. One thing to look for is that the toes are straighter in brown bears then in black. On the front foot, if you draw a straight line from the bottom of an outside toe across the top of the heel pad if the other outside toe falls at least half above the line then it is likely a brown bear, below and likely a black. On this track the toe would be completely above the line.



Another thing to look for is the claws. You can see here that the claws on the front feet are pretty long (good digging claws), whereas black bear claws tend to be much closer to the toes.