I went down to the Centennial Woods Natural Area for a couple hours on Saturday and walked around exploring the trail network through the pine stands and along the beaver marsh. It was a little above freezing and partly cloudy out, and the snow from the storm the week before had been melted a little bit and was relatively packed down. Although I didn’t have any direct encounters with an animal, I observed plenty of activity left behind by an exciting variety of different species, ranging from a Pileated Woodpecker to an Eastern Coyote. Overall, my experience with the iNaturalist app was very positive. The process of recording each observation in the app was straightforward and the location function made it easy to exactly pinpoint where in Centennial Woods I saw each track. I’m looking forward to getting some feedback on my identifications from other users because I might be wrong on a couple of them.
The first animal sign I came across was a porcupine trail cutting through the forest and heading North up a small hill just off the side of the path about a quarter of a mile in past the secondary entrance. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was because of its wide profile, but once I got up close and saw the pacing gait and the size difference between the front and hind tracks, I realized that the edges were made by quills and that it must be a porcupine. I followed its trail for a minute or so before it began to loop back around on itself near the base of a mature Eastern White Pine tree. It may have climbed up the tree at one point, although I couldn’t see into the canopy very well to tell if it was still there or not.
I regularly saw signs of deer activity all throughout the forest. There were some individual trails and then larger patches that seemed to have come from a group searching for food under the snow. Although I was pretty confident with my identification already, when I came across the clear hoof imprint in a shallow patch of snow under a large White Pine, along with the scat, I knew it had to be White-Tailed Deer.
In the side of a medium sized Northern White Pine, I came across what I think are signs of a Pileated Woodpecker drilling for carpenter ants. The wood chips at the base of the tree were fresh and the cavities had sap oozing out of them so it might have happened earlier that same day. Because of the size and oval shape of the cavities I think they must have been made by either a Pileated or Hairy Woodpecker, and I’m guessing Pileated because of their larger size.
I’m very tentatively guessing that this is Eastern Coyote scat. It could also easily be from a Gray or Red fox, or even a porcupine, although they usually make larger piles. It was in a shallow and packed down patch of snow and so I couldn’t make out any tracks to help with the identification.