January: Endurance

There were a lot of animal tracks seen around my site in Centennial Woods. Most of them were made by dogs since the tracks were often followed by human footprints and the trails are often used by owners to walk there dogs (Figure 1). However, there were a couple of gray squirrel and deer tracks off the side of the trails. The squirrels are probably very active, as they are less wary of humans and are constantly digging up their supply of hidden food during the winter (Figure 3+4). I was more surprised to see the deer tracks because I had assumed they would stay away from such frequently visited trails (Figure 2). However, in Naturally Curious by Mary Holland, it is stated that deer spend most of their time in deer beds under trees during the winter and that “white-tailed deer have great difficulty travelling through deep snow, and because of this they are far more vulnerable to attacks from predators” (Holland 393). It can be assumed that the deer were looking for food near the trails because the snow is more packed down due to the amount of hikers passing through, and this makes it easier for the deer to look for food. I was surprised to not see many bird tracks, but this could be due to most of the birds flying south, the fact that birds are arboreal, or that the snow was pretty old and since birds are very light, their tracks would only be visible in fresh snow.

I was able to identify a couple of deciduous trees by the twigs around my site. Almost all of the trees were sugar maples while one of them I believe is a sycamore tree based on the alternate branching and shaping of the buds (Twig and Tracking Guide 4). However, I am unsure of how frequent sycamores are in centennial woods and perhaps it could be another maple. I determined that most of the trees were sugar maples because the buds were brown, and had three extensions from the the tip, similar to the picture, which had the buds (Figure 7). The trees also had opposite branching and the buds were growing in an opposite pattern as well. I assumed the one twig to be a part of a sycamore tree because the buds were growing in an alternate formation rather than opposite like the sugar maple (Figure 8).

There are many phenological changes since the last time I visited my site since it has been nearly a month. The sky was very cloudy which cast a dark shade over the woods. The water level in the stream has raised quite a bit, almost at the top of the bank, due to the melting snow. The bend in the stream was rushing with water and some splashed onto the sides (Figure 6). All of the rocks that were once visible were completely covered by the water. The small island of dirt that I used to cross the stream with was covered in a large sheet of ice. There were small tracks across the ice which appeared to be a small squirrel. I wanted to get closer, but did not for fear of breaking the ice. The fallen tree that crosses the stream had man icicles hanging from underneath it, almost touching the water. The grass field that used to be so tall that it would block my view of the other side, was now so packed by the snow that I could clearly see the other side of the field which was filled with coniferous trees (Figure 5).

Citations

Holland, M., & Kaneko, C. (2019). Naturally curious: a photographic field guide and month-by-month journey through the fields, woods, and marshes of New England. North Pomfret, Vermont.: Trafalgar Square Books.