For this assignment, Allie Brown and I went down to the water to walk the path to North Beach. As soon as we got on the path, we started finding a ton of animal tracks, as the snow had been sitting there for a few days without any new snowfall. We found a few tracks that we believe belong to rabbits crisscrossing the path, with two large back feet and two smaller front feet staggered in front of it, the tracks seemed to be congregating around a patch of dense bushes. We also found a large hoofed animal track, which we initially believed to be a moose, just due to its pure size, but we go to thinking about the probability of a moose hanging out in the quite densely populated area of Burlington where we found it, we began to hypothesize about it being a deer. The size of the tracks wasn’t too large to be a deer. I have been an avid iNaturalist user for a good few years, but never used the ‘project’ feature, it was quite easy to figure out though. Its very cool to see so many of my peers submitting observations on the app I love.
These were our favorite tracks that we found, small bird tracks that seemed to appear and disappear very quickly. We thought that the bird could maybe have landed, picked up something and flew off very quickly. The size and shape of the tracks are similar to those made by crows, it seems like the crow could have hopped once, as it doesn’t look like it was walking in a direct register walking pattern.
This patch of tracks were much smaller than any that we had seen before this. They looked to be very scattered and going in every direction, as if there were many of the creatures, or maybe one that was moving sparatically. This was close by the crow tracks, so we thought maybe the creature was scared by the bird into running around in this strange manner. Our initial prediction was a vole, as we saw small footprints and a tail drag, but upon further research, we found out that mice tracks have tail drags, while vole tracks do not.
This was the deer/moose track that I talked about earlier. I believe it is a moose track, as the size is too large for a deer, but the location confuses me, as a moose wpould probably not be found walking around in the fairly populated section of Burlington we found this in.
