For this months phenology post, I started walking downtown on Pearl Street to see what I could find in one of the most developed parts of Burlington. The only true wildlife I saw was a bunch of American robins. For a good portion of the road every tree was inhabited by some robins, or they would poke around someone’s yard.
For the way back, I took less of a developed route and looped to a brook at the back of the woods behind Trinity campus. This area has a lot of low-lying brush and connects to a couple larger streams. While looking alongside the water, I noticed tracks that were distinctly from a bounding animal. Due to the series of melting and re-freezing, the tracks were very hard to determine.
The tracks were roughly 6 cm long and had some trailing to it which made it seem that the animal had dragged its toes across loose snow which made it seem like an old tracks, since we’ve not had fresh snow in Burlington in about a week.
Due to the lack of detail in the track, I am pretty torn between Fisher and Mink for the explanation of the tracks. I considered Marten too, but due to how rare they are in our area I assumed that it was probably one of the latter. If the tracks are truly the size I found them, I would definitely assume Fisher as they are typically 5-7.5 centimeter in length and width. However, due to the melting of snow, a smaller print could be expanded through melting. Plus, their smaller size seemed more able to handle the thick brush that the tracks were found in.