However, I didn't do the "wandering" part so much as the "tracking". Luckily I was at my parents house this weekend and not at my apartment, so the animal tracks were in far greater abundance. With the fresh snow that had recently fallen it wasn't very hard to see the tracks of all the animals that manage to remain hidden during the day hours.
While exploring outside in my backyard, the backyard that I have been exploring my whole life, I found the tracks of a few animals. Well four to be exact, and I am proud to say that I was able to identify all of them on my own and without the assistance of anyone else, or anything else (computer). The four types of tracks that I found were: deer, rabbit, squirrel, and dog. I was hoping to find something a little more exotic (not exactly sure what I was expecting) but I was pretty happy with what I found.
Anyway, I suppose I should show what the different tracks look like, and tell a little bit about what the animals that they belong to were doing in our backyard.
1. Deer. We always have deer hanging around in our backyard, mainly because we have two apple trees in the backyard that probably supply the deer with most of their food. Even during the winter months they still manage to find things to eat in the backyard, and this particular day was no exception. They mainly hand around the base of the trees, and occasionally make their way to the front yard. On this particular day I found the start of their tracks at the pine trees that border our yard, they walked around a bit near the trees, and exited the yard through the use of the same trail they came in. This was not surprising as most animals consistently use the same trails through the woods, and some species use the same trails. Anyway, here is what deer tracks look like:
This is essentially what they always look like, and are pretty easy to spot, even when it isn't snowy/rainy/muddy. They don't have very large feet compared to their body, so they sink down pretty far in the ground when the walk or run. Farther than a human even.
The next set of tracks that I found were squirrel tracks. I was kind of surprised to find squirrel tracks as I thought my father had gotten rid of most of them after he found out they were tearing off our roof shingles for sport. Anyway, they were mostly located at the base of our cedar tree, really close to the cedar tree. They seem to like hanging out in the cedar tree most, probably because it is the closest one to the house. But here are what squirrel tracks look like.
They are kind of cute and they have tiny little hands. Tiny little hands that cause a lot of trouble, but cute regardless.
Then I found rabbit tracks. I was definitely expecting this as we have several rabbits that live around our house and torment our dog. Interesting fact about rabbits is that they almost never travel more than 400 feet from where they were born. That and the reason they reproduce so quickly is because the females' ovulation is triggered by mating. So they can pretty much get pregnant whenever the hell they feel like it. Here are what their tracks look like.
They have very large back feet, which end up in front of their front feet on their tracks because of the way they hop. As a child I thought their tracks were facing the other way and tried to follow them in the completely opposite direction. Which is just as well because its not like I was actually going to catch a rabbit. The rabbit tracks were mainly focused around the side of our garage and going in and out of the tall grass surrounding one side of our yard, which is what rabbits prefer to live in.
The last set of tracks I found were dog tracks. Again, not surprising because we have a dog, and since our dog as full run of the yard her tracks were found pretty much everywhere. Especially where the other animal tracks were because she likes to pretend to chase things away so she looks like she's being useful. Anyway this is what typical dog footprints look like.
They are often mistaken with cat footprints (except for obvious size differences). The way you can tell them apart it by the claws. Dogs will almost always have little claw marks in their prints as they cannot retract their claws. Cats can however, and they do not walk around with their claws out, ever. So they do not show up on their foot prints.
Anyway this is what the dog that makes the dog foot prints looks like.
Her name is Taco and she is very sweet.
So that essentially wraps up my backyard adventure of looking for animals tracks. I had quite a nice time recording the different animal tracks that I had seen, and hypothesizing why they were they there.
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