Over the course of a couple of days, I went to a couple of sites in Burlington to look around for wildlife signs and recorded my findings in iNaturalist, which was usually an easy process.
On the day of the great snow storm of Sunday, February 16th, I hiked down to Centennial Woods to not visit my phenology spot, but just to hike around and look at the snowy woods. Look how beautiful!
As we were walking through the woods, I looked around for signs of wildlife, such as their tracks, scat, dens, or the animal itself. About a mile into our walk, my friend Elsa suddenly went, “Look!” We looked a saw a small black rodent like animal running around in the snow! We watched in run in a zig zag pattern, burrow under a tree, and then reappear, only to burrow into the snow again!
I got a picture of the little guy from afar, and then trekked into the snow to take a look at his tracks. He was running along in a zig zag pattern, had tail drag in his tracks, was burrowing into the snow, and seemed to be a galloper.
Based on all of this and the look of the little dude, I would guess it was a shrew.
I also visited the Intervale with my NR1020 lab! While at the Intervale, we saw a variety of animal signs, including a a rabbit, plenty of squirrels, and a pileated woodpecker!
Here is a picture of the bunny tracks. Based on the size and the four defined toes, I would say this was a snowshoe hare!
We also saw lots of squirrel tracks! So many squirrel tracks!!! We could tell these were gray squirrel tracks because of the way they jumped from trees down to the ground and back up to the trees in a hopping pattern.
We also saw a pileated woodpecker up in a tree while it pecked away, but unfortunately we did not get a picture because we were on our cross country skis. However, we could tell it was a pileated woodpecker because of its red head and the lovely holes that lined the tree it was on!
