The compacted snow crunches under my snow boots. I probably should have done this earlier in the day, but here I am, with only a few more hours of sunlight to do tracking too. I’ve wandered back to my old phenology spot, where the snow is still deep enough to maintain a decent enough track. I struggle a lot with tracking, so I need the best possible tracks I can find. The snow has already melted quite a bit, so I’ve already put myself at a disadvantage. Another disadvantage– I’m not wearing gloves. So when I use my hand as a reference for track size, it gets dunked into the snow around it. If I cared a bit more for my hand’s temperature, I would have brought gloves, but it isn’t that bad to feel the cooling sensation before warming it up in the pocket next to my phone.
I’m wearing headphones as I wander around by fallen trees to try and find any interesting tracks. It’s deliberate– outside sounds and voices are stimulating– too much so, and can make me panic and lose track of what I’m out here to do. So instead, to the sound of some random rock song, I follow a trail of hopping tracks, trying to find where they lead. I still don’t succeed, getting distracted by the bark around me. I lose interest in animals pretty quickly, instead focusing on trees– much more reliable to identify than whatever made the trail I was following. Nevertheless, I try to continue on, focusing on trying to imagine the animal that left these indents in the snow.
~~~
I’m back in my dorm room, eating a bowl of pasta as I look over zoomed-in pictures of the tracks. I’m trying (and mostly failing) to figure out a trail of bounding tracks solely based on size– the track itself has melted away. I line up my hand to different tracks in the guide, trying to find one of a similar size. I’ve already identified the easy tracks– Grey Squirrel, one of the more common examples found in Burlington (with a pretty distinct tract and size, easy to differentiate from Red Squirrel based on size)– so I’ve now been stuck, staring at two tracks for thirty minutes. I hate identification of this variety and I mutter as I finally decide that a Racoon would be my best guess (its size fit best with what I observed)– the uncertainty kills me, but I’m finally able to post the observation on iNaturalist. That part is easy enough, nothing too special, just an upload of an image with my best Id guess (which I wish was more a fact).
