Tracking stellar despite recent snow

One February day, an Audubon class in tracking was scheduled. Audubon folks signed up to participate and the day drew near. I hoped for a good tracking snow to fall several days before, to give animals at least two nights to track it up.

My heart sank as it started to snow the night before. Snow lasted into the very morning of the class. I thought there might be no tracks for people to see. A dozen people arrived at the meeting place, including several members of the Bangor Land Trust, as the event was held on its property. The event was planned so Audubon folks, who are often good naturalists, could help the land trust people know what mammals lived on their 250-acre parcel of land.

Among the participants were five students from Old Town High School and science teacher Ed Lindsey, an Audubon member. The students were members of two Envirothon teams, the Siamese and the Maine Coon Cats. Envirothon teams compete in environmental studies, including tracking.

Some participants put on snowshoes; others planned to walk in their boots only. After introductions, we headed down the trail. Right away, a trail of paired footprints led away from a hole in the snow and across the trail. The nickel-size tracks were all in pairs, in varying distances apart. The little animal went in bounds, some long bounds and some short – the sign of the short-tailed weasel, also known as ermine. The trail led into a dense thicket of balsam fir and disappeared.

Weasels are beautiful, long and slim little animals, brown in summer and white in winter, with a black tip on the three-inch tail. They are very skilled at catching mice, their primary prey. They hunt day and night; perhaps that explains our finding their fresh tracks that day.

Participants found other signs of animals that one finds, snow or not: twigs browsed by deer and twigs browsed by snowshoe hare.

Deer leave a shredded end of twig, because they have only lower front teeth, no upper front teeth. They grasp the twig between the bottom teeth and the upper gum pad and jerk it upwards, yanking off the end of the twig. That usually leaves a little shred of bark on the twig’s end.

Snowshoe hare have sharp lower and upper incisors; they clip twigs off neatly.

Trackers also found tracks of deer and snowshoe hare, animals that were active at dawn.

They found the trail of a porcupine that had gone from a big hemlock tree across the Bangor Land Trust path, through the woods and across the path again. Porcupines waddle when they walk, and they are plump and heavy. They leave a trough in the snow, with footprints and a wavy trail mark.

The Old Town students bushwhacked through thorny underbrush, following the porcupine’s trail. Their persistence was rewarded; the trail led to the porcupine’s den, a hole in a pile of logs, stumps and rocks. The porcupine was undoubtedly at home, but it was too dark for us to see inside, with the bright sun and snow all around.

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