HOLDEN – Mrs. Boyle, a teacher at the Bangor Christian School, brought her fifth-grade class to the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden recently. She wanted the children to learn about animal tracks.

The center’s naturalists were a little worried that there would be no tracks – it takes several nights and good tracking snow to see a lot of tracks. A snowstorm occurred the night before the class’s field trip, but brought granular snow that made a hard crust; no squirrels or mice had left tracks. In addition, the biting cold kept small animals denned up.

Luckily, a naturalist caught a deer mouse in a “hav-a-hart” trap and wanted to relocate the mouse at the Audubon Center. The children lined up in a good spot to free the mouse.

Once freed, the mouse bounded quickly across the snow and into the woods. The children laughed at the fast, zigzag bounds and flailing tail of the mouse as it ran. Naturalists thought that the mouse had left no visible tracks, but a sharp-eyed child spotted some tracks just where the mouse had disappeared down a hole in the snow.

State Rep. Bob Duchesne, an avid birder and officer of the Penobscot Valley Chapter of Maine Audubon, led a birding trip recently.

He reported, “The weather cooperated for the first half of the field trip. It was neither too cold nor too breezy to scan the gulls and ducks in the Penobscot River. [We saw] common goldeneyes and mergansers at Eddington Bend. We spent a few minutes at Leonard’s Mills hearing, but not seeing, crossbills.

“However, by the time we reached the Sunkhaze National Wildlife Refuge in Milford, the wind had picked up and the sky was threatening,” Duchesne said. “The birds disappeared. Even though I had found gray jays, boreal chickadees and a barred owl on the day before, none would show for field trip participants. We didn’t even find a chickadee or a crow. People did seem to enjoy seeing the secret locations they could later check out on their own, but the birds were definitely hiding.”

Field trip participant Rhonda Preble wasn’t a bit daunted by the lack of birds. On going home, she called the Fields Pond Audubon Center to sign up for Duchesne’s next birding trip.

For information on Fields Pond Audubon Center, call 989-2591.