Savoring the long weekend, a friend and I headed down to Centennial Woods on Monday afternoon. Following the several snow squalls the day before, we were expecting to run into quite a few tracks.

As soon as we entered, we noticed several very distinct tracks. Below includes a Snowshoe Hare (bounder), Fisher (pacer), and an Eastern Grey Squirrel track (galloper).

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We didn’t run into any scat sightings along our walk, which was a bit dissapointing. However, we ran into a few interesting den sites… made by both people and wildlife. The bottom left photo shows a man-made den site, which likely makes a good sitting stop for hikers. This spot is also probably used by nearby wildlife at night as a den, but its visibility remains its only flaw. The photo on the right was an interesting tree mystery we found – the tree seems to have grown around fallen branch, as if it was strangling it.

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Using the iNaturalist app, we also logged some tree species such as Eastern White Pine (left), Red Oak, and American Beech. We came across some semi-frozen streams (middle), which looked like they were warming up due to increasing temperatures. Another cool thing we found was Witch’s Butter on top of a broken branch. Shown below, witch’s butter is common jelly fungus that is frequently found on dead but attached and on recently fallen branches. It’s very small in size but we were able to detect it due to its vibrant color.

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We were hoping that the iNaturalist app could help detect some bird noises, but unfortunately we could not get audio good enough for translation. Centennial woods looks like it’s gearing up for spring in the next few weeks – and with this warm weather will come some new nature mysteries to understand!

Until next time…