I visited Centennial Woods and I took photos of any tracks I saw during my day to day on campus. Using the iNaturalist app was fairly easy and self-explanatory. I like that we are forced to use iNaturalist because I don’t think I would otherwise have participated in the City Nature Challenge, which I think is a really cool project. Unfortunately, I didn’t see a bunch of exciting tracks, which I think is mainly due to the lack of snow recently and the fact that everything is so muddy.
What I found:
- I’m not completely sure what species the first set of tracks below belong to. It appears that the animal is a bounder, but the tracks don’t strongly resemble any of the animals in the bounder category. They most closely resemble the tracks of a weasel, but I’m not completely sure. I feel like they could be rabbit tracks instead, although the track pattern doesn’t really seem to match.
- The cottontail rabbit tracks I saw resemble the tracks of a snowshoe hare, but after looking at the guide I realized that they are definitely too small to be snowshoe hare tracks.
- The white-tail deer was really easy to identify because they have really recognizable tracks and the tracks were really clear because they had frozen into ice.
- The dog tracks that I saw look like they could be coyote tracks, but since I found them so close to campus and where people regularly walk their dogs, I figured it is a dog track.
