To contribute to our NR2 iNaturalist Project, I decided to take a walk down to Battery Park. My family was up for the weekend, so I roamed around the park with them looking for any sign of wildlife. Unfortunately, the snow was melted so we didn’t find many tracks, but there was a bit of mud that saved the day!
The first thing I noticed while downtown was the sounds of birds chirping. I did attempt to record the calls, but the noise of traffic overshadowed the birds. I did manage to get a picture of a black-capped chickadee in a tree, though! To identify it as a chickadee, I looked through the other bird observations in the Wildlife Signs in Burlington Project on iNaturalist and decided on the species that this bird looked the most like – the chickadee. This one actually looked exactly like the iNaturalist cover image for the black-capped chickadee.
Like I mentioned before, there was a bit of mud to look for tracks in, so I paid close attention to all the patches. Luckily, my sister spotted a small print below a tree in the park! I was thankful to have brought my Mammal Tracks and Scat Life-Size Pocket Guide with me, because I wasn’t sure at first what this track might be. I thought it might unfortunately be a small dog, but after measuring it and comparing it to the drawings in the book, I settled on the Eastern gray squirrel because of the long toes. This print was just a front foot based on its size.
The last find I had of the day was some scat. This one was pretty easy to identify, because it was very round and matched the drawing of the cottontail rabbit scat in the tracks and scat guide to a T.
These three observations were the only ones I logged onto iNaturalist for our NR2 project. The app was super easy to use and it was fun to see the map of where everyone had been and seen signs of wildlife! I wish I had had the time to go out in the snow and maybe catch a few more tracks, but I’m happy that there were still wildlife signs to find in the absence of snow.
I did not log these observations, but I also came across signs of woodpeckers (holes in trees) and also a huge bird nest!
