North Beach – Tuesday, February 14, 2023
I choose to go to North Beach to observe wildlife tracks in Burlington. The snow was mostly melted but there were still some tracks visible in the remaining snow and a few tracks in the mud. The iNaturalist app was relatively easy to navigate, however, we had to determine the species we observed ourselves, whereas with the seek app, it helps you identify the species. With that being said, the iNaturalist app allowed us to put our knowledge of animal tracking to the test as we tried to identify the tracks we found.
What I saw:
I concluded that the bird tracks came from a bird and not from a mammal based on the triangular, webbed tracks. I was unable to identify the species specifically.
There was an abundance of deer tracks throughout the woods of North Beach, many of which overlapped as shown in the second picture of deer tracks. I quickly identified them as deer tracks due to the deep indents into the snow and smooth rounded edges that are indicative of deer tracks.
When looking at the red squirrel tracks, I narrowed the species down to squirrel, chipmunk, or mink. I ruled out the possibility of chipmunk tracks because the tracks were larger than an average chipmunk’s. I then more closely examined the tracks and deducted that the tracks were most likely from a squirrel because of the location of them. It’s possible that a squirrel jumped from the above tree and made the tracks shown above. I stated that the squirrel tracks were from a red squirrel because they were too small to belong to a grey squirrel.
I narrowed the final tracks down to either be raccoon or muskrat tracks. I decided these tracks were from a raccoon because of the faint claw indents in the soil. The overall shape and size of the tracks also more closely resembled raccoon tracks.
