Please see the note in my January posting for an explanation of why this is coming so late. Thank you 🙂
Me and a few friends went on a walk from central campus almost to North Beach, going through the waterfront and through the trail near the Rock Point School. On the way, we encountered a stream of train cars that were not currently in use. I don’t believe the train was abandoned, from what I have heard from long-time Burlington residence, these cars just were not necessary for the traveling they were doing.
On our walk, we encountered several tracks and deer beds. We didn’t, however, encounter many animals or plants directly that we investigated and therefore did not use iNaturalist very much on this expedition, though I am a regular iNaturalist user and I love the application very much.
We had a difficult time identifying these tracks. The mouse tracks seemed the most apparent, as they were very small and it’s easy to see the tail dragging along behind it. The tracks that we thought may be from a coyote have hair on them, which we thought could mean that it was either scratching itself or holding some kind of prey in its mouth that may have been shedding while being eaten. We also originally had thought it may have been a rabbit that was killed there, but we thought they may be more evidence of blood if that were the case. There were also canine-looking tracks leading up to this site, which you can’t see very well in the photo. The last photo was difficult to identify, but I guessed that it may be two perfect-stepping animals that were originally walking one behind the other, and then next to each other, which is why the one path seems to diverge into two. I guessed that they were deer due to the fact that it looks like hoof prints and they were roughly the size of a deer track.
These two photos show a deer bed that we encountered on our trip. You can see the outline of a deer’s body, as well as several hoof tracks near it. It’s likely that a deer stopped to lay down here for a short time before continuing to move.
It was very fascinating to me to see this deer bed, as it is a really nice insight into the life of another animal. Upon seeing this, it’s easier to imagine the activity that happens every day in the woods and how the animals function on their own. We also saw a large bird fly overhead that I could not get a photo of, but we couldn’t identify it. It looked like an eagle of some kind, or a large hawk, which was so fascinating to see in Burlington in the middle of winter. This trip was a very enriching experience, and it was so great to get outside in the winter and see all of the things that I was missing out on that week while I was mostly staying indoors.