On Thursday, February 15, I decided to go past my usual spot at the Salmon Hole and follow the Winooski River down to the Intervale. For a while along the trail, the only thing I saw were gray squirrel tracks, which I could tell due to the length of the tracks I spotted being 5 centimeters and the fact that red squirrels prefer coniferous forests. Though I’ve seen many squirrel prints by now, the prints on Thursday were more clearly visible than usual which was exciting. I was getting down about there being less snow a couple of days ago, so it was thrilling to go out and track again in the fresh snow. I did more walking around and didn’t find any tracks that stood out to me, so I turned my attention up to the trees and the many bird calls I was hearing. I heard a lot of chickadee and crow calls, along with some calls that I did not recognize (which I have added audio clips of below; sorry if they’re hard to hear because of the wind). While I was looking up more, I also noticed a couple of trees with holes that I assume were either from the nearby chickadees, or by other birds such as woodpeckers and nuthatches. I also saw a tree that looked like it had beaver chew marks on it which was really cool!
After this, I kept walking along the Winooski, keeping an eye out for any interesting tracks. Then, a path of hand-like prints leading towards the river caught my attention. The fact that the length of these tracks was about 6 centimeters mixed with the fact that they were in groups of two side by side led me to believe these were raccoon prints. After this, I went closer to the bank of the river and spotted a different set of tracks that looked very interesting. At first glance, I saw five toes in the print and got very excited, assuming it could’ve been part of the weasel family. However, after measuring these prints and looking at their pattern, I concluded that they were probably skunk prints (or potentially raccoon, but I’m leaning towards skunk). I came to this conclusion not only because of the track’s size but because of the fact that the tracks had one front foot in front of the larger hind foot, which is similar to that of a skunk.
All in all, it was really cool to explore an area outside of the Salmon Hole that I had never been to before. After making this visit, I uploaded pictures that I took onto iNaturalist, which is one of my favorite apps for organism identification. After uploading, I got responses to some of my pictures confirming some of the suspicions I had about what I saw. For example, someone responded to my raccoon track pictures agreeing that they were most likely raccoon tracks, and someone else responded to my picture of the tree with the chew marks and said they were probably from a beaver. It was cool to see this confirmation from others.
Unidentified bird call audios
Gray squirrel tracks
Raccoon tracks
Skunk (?) prints that I followed leading to a tree overhang
Tree with beaver marks
Trees with holes and other marks left by birds
To close, here’s a picture I took of the icy Winooski river : )
