Centennial woods is a plot of forested land right by the UVM campus. There is a surplus of wildlife found in these woods including squirrels, foxes, beavers, bobcats, mink, white-tailed deer, and many more. The conditions made tracking a little difficult because most of the snow was melted. There had also been rain earlier in the week and then a freeze. Many tracks were not very clear because they had melted and then refrozen. However, the ground was soft, so a lot of recent tracks were noticeable in the mud.
The first animal that we tracked seemed to have been climbing up an embankment along a small stream flowing into the valley. It had four toes and one was leading. There were also no noticeable claw marks. This made me think that it could be a bobcat especially because of the leading toe and because its tracks continued following the hydrological trail. On our lab in Jericho we tracked a bobcat that had many of the same characteristics as these tracks. Is bobcat maybe a bit of a reach for the centennial area? Maybe, but there have been sightings and tracks of them there before and the evidence adds up.
The next animal we tracked was a deer traveling along the bottom of the valley in a wetland area that is now covered in snow. The deer was identifiable because of it is a diagonal walker and very easily identifiable hoof tracks. The hoof prints are much smaller then a moose and elk really aren’t in this area so white-tailed deer was the one that made the most sense. We noticed that it seemed like the deer was speeding up and taking bounding steps towards a fallen tree because its stride lengthened approaching the tree. On the other side of the tree there were deeper hoof marks where i suspect the deer landed after jumping over the tree.
The most difficult part of tracking was how many dog prints there were since centennial is such a popular place for people to take their dogs for walks. However, we did find one track that looked different from the other dog tracks. It was smaller than most of the dog prints and pad spacing was different. It seemed to match closely with a red fox. The only thing that didn’t make sense was there were no noticeable claw prints. However, we thought that because of the conditions and the freeze thaw that has been going on the claw prints might have been shallow and with the changing conditions they might have just melted away to be unnoticeable.
Overall using inaturalist was very helpful because you can also see what other people have found in the woods and base some of your own observations and hypothesis on certain tacks about what other people have also found. It also helped with some of the identification aspects although I found that generally wasn’t able to give suggestions for tracks. However, the app is easy to use and i find it really interesting being able to see what other people have found in the Burlington areas.
