During my search wildlife and tracking, I had found the best pair of clear tracks during our lab at Intervale. While walking through the cross country ski trails, me and some of my lab partners had found multiple pairs of tracks in the deep snow. We believe for them to be either shrew or vole tracks, because of the size, speed and direction of travel. We had also found a Pileated Woodpecker, chipping away at a tree and making calls to another close by, sadly we couldn’t find any tracks in the snow of the Pileated, but it was enjoyable to watch. In the case of INaturalist, while I have previously used it before, I believe that every experience I’ve had with the app has been smooth and clear.
We saw around 3-4 pairs of these tracks dragging through the snow and from our narrative, we believe it could’ve been a little pack, or family of shrews running through the fresh snow, and diving into a pack of old junkyard farm machines. We figured this is where they take cover in the Winter, since it protects from wind and predators in the sky. We narrowed our identification by recalling from previous tracks we had seen on lab, and with some help from Professor Walt we had figured out it was a shrew. We chose these tracks over all the other ones we think we had found, because they were the clearest and easiest to define, also nobody else had found them before we had, so they were original findings.