This week, rather than visiting my specific phenology spot, my friends and I went looking for animal tracks and signs around Burlington. We made the decision to stay a little closer to campus and mainly focused on the wooded area on the north end of the golf course near campus. Given that a lot of the snow cover is pretty glazed over with ice, we weren’t really expecting to find detailed tracks. But in the more tree covered area near the golf course, we sort of struck a track goldmine. The snow was not fluffy and was more of a sandy texture, the the tracks we found were almost perfect and easy to follow and identify. We found tracks primarily from Grey Squirrels, Chipmunks, and what we are guessing is either an American Robin or Chickadee.
Bird feet! Probably robins, given the size 
Squirrel tracks, followed a distinct path 
Chipmunk tracks at the base of a tree
We followed a lot of the tracks pretty far through the little patch of forest. The chipmunk tracks did not cover quite the distance that the squirrel tracks did and also stayed fully in the trees, unlike the squirrel tracks, many sets of which continued on to the golf course (we weren’t able to follow these as well because the snow was a much icier texture out in the open). A lot of the chipmunk tracks came and went from a dug out area under a stump, maybe a potential den site.
While we were in the woods, we saw a few grey squirrels, and a pair of chickadees. The chickadees actually got pretty close, and landed on branches only a few feet from us. They didn’t seem super distressed that we were in their space or anything, because they moved on pretty quickly. Watching them move, they stayed entirely in the canopy, not landing on the ground at all. The fact that they didn’t land on the ground, and the fact that they are so little, makes me thing that the bird tracks we saw were indeed robins and not chickadees. We briefly considered that maybe they were crow tracks, but crows tend to move in a normal walking pattern, whereas robins hop or take short hurried steps, which is more what these tracks looked like (side by side or close together.)
As for using iNaturalist, I like how it can be used to catalogue all the species I’ve seen, and things that have been seen by my classmates. We spent some time looking at the other animals that people have found, and it was interesting to see the range. I wish there was a way to add a sort of description to the sightings or track posts though, because then we could get/give some context as to where the animal was going or what sort of terrain the tracks were found in.