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Now here's a set of tracks
that caught me off guard (see image at left). They're from
an animal that I'm well familiar with, but the way I
encountered them threw me "off track", at first. This
picture is actually of the prints that helped me solve the
mystery. Can you guess what animal made these tracks?
 I was photographing some jack rabbit
tracks at the far end of Notre Dame Avenue in Winnipeg, where the
road runs between the airport and Brookside Cemetery. The airport
property is a wide open field and there are lots of jack rabbits in
and around the general area. The cemetery is well treed and has lots
of clumps of shrubs; it's good cotton-tail rabbit habitat. I had followed
a set of jack rabbit tracks along the ditch, then came across a patch
of smaller, jumbled up tracks. They were about the size of cotton-tail
tracks. One set of prints formed a characteristic "rabbit track" pattern,
with two side-by-side prints and two in-line prints, or so I thought.
I was in the right area for cotton-tails, so this jumped to mind first.
Remember, I had rabbit tracks on the brain.
As I always do with any set
of tracks, after initially trying to identify the track from
its shape, I started to scan the area to see where the
tracks came from and lead to, and was immediately puzzled.
What appeared to be only one paw print was placed randomly
about, around the initial clump of tracks. Rabbits are not
known for jumping around on one foot! And there seemed to be
no prints leading away. Was this some sort of bird's tracks?
Then I noticed a line of "single paw" prints, spaced at
quite a distance for such small tracks, leading from the
road edge through the ditch towards the jumble of tracks.
Something had made several significant leaps, for its size,
to reach the spot where I first noticed the tracks. Of
course... a weasel! Likely a short-tailed weasel, by the
size of the prints. I looked for a good impression and
examined it closely. And sure enough, there was the
evidence, two paw prints in what I had first thought was a
single foot print. Weasels normally travel by bounding and
they place their two front paws side by side, with the left
and right paws touching each other. Then the hind paws are
placed exactly on top of the front paw prints, so you
usually only see a set of pairs of prints laid out in a long
line.
Merely by chance this weasel
had jumped around and left the pattern of a "rabbit track",
momentarily confusing me. I hadn't been prepared for weasel
tracks in that location and I realize now that I hadn't seen
many weasel tracks in those kind of snow conditions. There
was 1 cm of fresh snow on a base of hard packed snow, so
only the weasel's foot prints were visible. Ordinarily when
you find weasel tracks in snow, it's in softer snow - they
don't tend to venture onto the wind blown and packed snow,
out in the open, for fear of owls or other predators
grabbing them. Weasels travelling in deeper snow leave more
of a "body-impression" that makes their tracks more obvious
and characteristic. You can usually see the sets of scrapes
left by the entry and exit of the paired feet, in the
direction the animal was travelling.
I never did find a set of
tracks leading away, or towards if the first set were the
"going away" prints, from the original jumble of tracks.
With weasels it's often hard to tell which direction they're
travelling. But on realizing how far the weasel could jump,
based on the one line of tracks, it was apparent that it
could have made it to another hard patch of snow with one
bound.
That's what I like about
tracking animals in the snow. There's always another mystery
to be solved and insight to be gained into the lives of
animals!
Carry on, for some examples
of tracks in the field (Click the right arrow below).
Or jump to our guide to Manitoba critter tracks:
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