Look closerMammals
Reading animal tracks in snow by the pattern of the whole trail
When: December to March
Snow blurs a footprint and then widens it as it melts, so print detail lies to you. The shape the whole trail makes does not, and you can learn three of them in a morning.
Why this time of year
The window is the morning after fresh snow, before wind and sun work on it. That is a handful of mornings a winter, and it is the only time the yard keeps a record of everything that crossed it overnight.
How to notice it
- Go out the morning after a fresh fall and find a trail rather than a single print.
- Rabbit: a repeating bound making a tall thin rectangle of four tracks, the big back feet landing ahead of the small front ones.
- Squirrel: also a bound, but wide and blocky rather than tall and narrow. Same idea, different proportions.
- Deer: hind feet landing on top of the front prints, so the trail reads as a neat line rather than four separate feet.
- Follow one trail as far as you can instead of cataloguing many. Where it starts and where it goes is the story.
Try this with kids: Follow one animal's tracks as far as they go. Where was it going, and did it stop anywhere?
a bound is a gait where the animal pushes off and lands with the feet together, which is why the prints come in repeating sets
Safety
- Watch for ice under fresh snow, and keep off frozen ponds and streams whatever the tracks are doing.
Sources
- naturetracking.comGait patterns are one of the best tools to ID tracks in snow and some species are recognizable from a distance by the pattern alone; individual track detail is unreliable in snow because tracks become distorted and expand dramatically as snow melts; rabbits show repeating bound patterns with four tracks forming a tall thin rectangle; squirrels a wide and blocky bounding pattern; deer leave tracks where the hind feet overlap the front prints; cats use a direct register walk
In the guide for December, January, February, March