This week, I took a journey to Centennial woods in pursuit of wildlife signs to contribute to the “Wildlife signs in Burlington Project” on inaturalist. Due to the icy conditions of the trail it was a challenging hike. I certainly wish I had brought spikes!
Despite the melting snow, I was able to record some signs of wildlife including White-tailed deer prints and potential coyote prints. I also recorded the song of a Black Capped Chickadee and saw the daily roosting of crows at dusk.
In order to Identify the tracks I saw, I used the gait patterns and size of the tracks and compared it to the photos present in my track and scat guide. For identifying bird calls, I used to merlin bird ID app.
I labeled the hoof tracks I saw as a white-tailed deer cause they were much too small to be moose tracks. The other tracks I saw were a bit trickier. When focusing on just size, I eliminated the possibility of a fox; they were much bigger. I decided the against feline tracks as well because I could not identify a leading toe. The very symmetrical look of the print, the forward pointing claws, and the x present in between the toe pads and main pad caused me to narrow down the options to coyote. Additionally, the prints following a relatively straight path led me to decide against domestic dog, since they tend to run around without a care for conserving energy. Also, domestic dogs have weaker, less symmetrical paws with claws pointing every which way. I am in no way confident that I identified these tracks correctly but as Walt once said “A good tracker is never one hundred precent certain!”