Stories in the Snow
I've seen lots of interesting impressions in the snow over the last few weeks. Things are getting a bit chaotic now, though, after two weeks of overlapping and intersecting impressions and tracks.
Here's an impression I saw this morning, next to the dish we use to feed the outdoor stray cat.
Here's another, from some kind of mouse, I assume.
A bird, hunting a rabbit?
This one's more subtle, a day old wing impression. From a raven, I imagine.
The other day I saw a group of very agitated ravens harassing a bald eagle in flight. No pictures of that, unfortunately.
I've gained a fresh appreciation for the enormous number of rabbits that live right around our house. The ground is covered with intersecting rabbit tracks and some areas are packed down hard from having been traversed so often. I hadn't realized that rabbits had trails.
I've come across something very peculiar in a few different areas: snow covered with large bird tracks and wing impressions (from ravens, most likely, since they're the most abundant big birds here right now), surrounding patches of rabbit urine. The patches have been pecked apart. The first few times I saw the pecked-apart urine patches, I didn't realize what they were, I thought someone had vomited in the snow; there are pecked apart pieces of orange-colored snow littered over the ground.
But later I saw similar patches surrounded by the bird tracks and wing impressions and I realized the chunks are created when the birds peck at the snow. I did a little google searching to see if this is a common thing for ravens to do, and other than one passing reference in an 1850-something journal to a different kind of bird pecking at patches of human urine, I found nothing. My hypothesis is that the birds are seeking out some mineral, salt perhaps, from the urine.
A few years ago I read some of Tom Brown's books on tracking. Though there some stuff in them I'm highly skeptical of, I recommend them anyway. They have a lot of useful information on reading animal signs and wilderness survival.
Here are two I read that are relevant to reading tracks and impressions in the snow:
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| Chaotic tracks in the snow heading into a drainage ditch. |
Here's an impression I saw this morning, next to the dish we use to feed the outdoor stray cat.
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| Bird impression in the snow |
Here's another, from some kind of mouse, I assume.
 | |||
| Mouse tracks in the snow |
A bird, hunting a rabbit?
This one's more subtle, a day old wing impression. From a raven, I imagine.
The other day I saw a group of very agitated ravens harassing a bald eagle in flight. No pictures of that, unfortunately.
I've gained a fresh appreciation for the enormous number of rabbits that live right around our house. The ground is covered with intersecting rabbit tracks and some areas are packed down hard from having been traversed so often. I hadn't realized that rabbits had trails.
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| Rabbit superhighway. |
I've come across something very peculiar in a few different areas: snow covered with large bird tracks and wing impressions (from ravens, most likely, since they're the most abundant big birds here right now), surrounding patches of rabbit urine. The patches have been pecked apart. The first few times I saw the pecked-apart urine patches, I didn't realize what they were, I thought someone had vomited in the snow; there are pecked apart pieces of orange-colored snow littered over the ground.
But later I saw similar patches surrounded by the bird tracks and wing impressions and I realized the chunks are created when the birds peck at the snow. I did a little google searching to see if this is a common thing for ravens to do, and other than one passing reference in an 1850-something journal to a different kind of bird pecking at patches of human urine, I found nothing. My hypothesis is that the birds are seeking out some mineral, salt perhaps, from the urine.
A few years ago I read some of Tom Brown's books on tracking. Though there some stuff in them I'm highly skeptical of, I recommend them anyway. They have a lot of useful information on reading animal signs and wilderness survival.
Here are two I read that are relevant to reading tracks and impressions in the snow:
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