For the “Wildlife in Burlington” phenology blog post, I decided to mostly stay on campus and do some mammal tracking. The main area which I explored was the open area with some trees by the Davis Center Tunnel exit. I figured this area would have at least some activity, due to the presence of scattered trees and the lack of man-made pathways. First, I’ll start with the tracks that were relatively easy to identify, and some of the straightforward mammal sightings:
Now for the more difficult-to-identify tracks. Some of these may definitely just be from a domestic dog or cat, but I wasn’t quite sure.
Additionally, after doing the initial tracking, I realized there was a culvert with animal tracks on either end, right behind the University Heights complex. This culvert with animal tracks represents the interactions between wildlife and man-made structures.
Overall, my experience using iNaturalist went pretty well, except iNat didn’t quite help with any identifications as the top guess was consistently “American Fisher” when obviously, none of these tracks are from a fisher. I’ve been using iNaturalist for about a year now, so I didn’t experience difficulty with uploading my findings and adding potential identifications. The only thing I found slightly annoying is that your upload is required to have an identification for it to be added to the project, which was kind of unfortunate because I wasn’t totally certain about some identifications so some of my uploads will remain in my general observations until I get a suggested identification.
