What up guys, went tracking the other day, super fun stuff. I remember Mike saying that tracking was a therapeutic practice and I couldn’t agree more, I had such a fun time in the woods stomping around and enjoying a cool new area. I drove up to Derway Island, the northernmost tip of Burlington at a deeply entrenched meander of the Winooski river just before its outlet into Lake Champlain. The woods in this area were super cool. The land had a super flat topography and sandy soil, it reminded me of the floodplain of the Little River in the town I grew up in. A tall canopy and a sparse understory allowed me to move through the woods pretty easily and peep through trees to see what was ahead. I was expecting to be let down with my visit since there was very little snow and I am not very confident in my tracking abilities, but I was presently surprised with my adventure! When I first started walking the path along the river I kept on noticing a bunch of stumps along the riverbank. At first I figured they were just pruned by someone trying to take care of the trail and remove dead trees or something (I wasn’t sure). But upon further inspection I found that the stumps were covered in little chew marks and were surrounded by piles of wood-chips. This of course is the product of our furry friend, the American Beaver 🙂
Riding on the excitement of these new discoveries I headed down to the riverbank to try and see if I could find some beaver tracks in the soft silty soil. Unfortunately, my excited searchings were to no avail. This search for beaver tracks were not without some degree of sucess. As I paced along the edge of the river I heard a crashing through the woods probably 30 yards inland of where I was searching. Startled (and a little bit scared) I cautiously darted towards the noise to try and see what it was. Off in the distance, still visible through the sparse winter understory, I could see the white tails of a couple deer bobbing off into the distance. Needless to say, I was so excited. The adrenaline kicked in and I ‘half-ran’/’half-scampered’ through the woods in the direction of the deer. I was aware that I didn’t want to harass the deer so after my adrenaline wore off I decided that I would calm down and instead try and track the deer at a walking pace. Fortunately this new frame of mind and its accompanying mental clarity allowed me to find a game trail that led deep into the woods. Broken sticks, animal scat and the occasional track or two led me further north, following the crest of the river as it slowly arced westward in front of me. And there they were… two White Tailed deer stared back at me as I rounded the corner of a tree and spotted them standing broadside towards me. I was so excited.
Finding the actual organism, scat and tracks was such a cool experience but after I found the deer I turned around and let them go about their day. While walking back towards my car I took a different route and found some even fresher deer tracks. I believe that these tracks were from the initial instance when I heard them running through the woods behind me. The snow wasn’t settled around the track, the pads of the tracks weren’t iced over yet, and unlike the other tracks these ones were leading in the opposite direction (which lines up with the direction they were running when I first heard them). During the rest of my tracking I found a couple of other animal signs but was not able to form a concrete identification of the animal. One track I found was a canine print. I initially thought that it could be a coyote or maybe a fox, but after looking in my tracking guide the print was far too big to be any of the canine species native to Vermont. I assume that it must have been left there by a domestic Dog that someone was walking through the area. This would make sense because there was no direct registering apparent in the tracks and the toes seem kind-of ‘splayed out’, which is typical to see in dog tracks. I also found a rotted tree with a bunch of holes in it. This caught my eye because I thought that it could be a sign of some sort of woodpecker, but I couldn’t find any other signs that it was specifically a woodpecker. It could have been the result of insects or just plain old rot, either way, I thought it was pretty neat.
Overall I had a good time using the iNaturalist app and recording my observations. When I got back to my dorm I checked out the NR2 project on iNaturalist and had a good time checking out other people’s observations and trying to help with identification. The animals that I encountered–both directly and indirectly– and the observations I made were super fulfilling and it seems like something I would like to do for fun, especially on a dreary or otherwise boring day 🙂
Thanks for reading!
-Finn Murphy