Tracking Club on 5/19/12

If you wanted to know the differences among shorebirds, how robins move, the stories in deer trails, and how to tell vole from deer mouse tracks, you should have been at Tracking Club.  For intermediate trackers, these stations might have seemed elementary at first, but they turned out to be layered and challenging.  We had a good discussion about using the tracking funnel (big picture map to small picture track detail) to decipher partial and obscured tracks.  Participants were led to discover a beaver trail from a partial front and the dog-like toes of two back tracks.

The robins across the river began alarming at one point and those who were keeping themselves tuned to their surroundings caught sight of a Red-tailed hawk.  Later the bird wheeled over us several times putting the sun behind it to show us the red in it’s fanned out tail.

We had a great day in the sun on the banks of the river at Chinook Bend. 

April Tacking Club

We were blessed with a beautiful sunny day for our April Tracking Club. We went to the Stossil Creek area and found some really interesting track and sign.

 A good number of people turned up including four children. All were prepared to clamber over fallen trees, cross creeks and bushwhack when needed.

We found trees that had been marked and bitten by bears.

 We found beaver dams and chews, aplodontia burrows, racoon tracks, cougar scrapes, kill sites, and robin's nests.

An aplodontia burrow.

A cougar scrape:

And finally a mystery for our viewers:  A kill site, can you identify the partial skulls?

March Tracking Club

Last Saturday morning I heard the rain as soon as I woke up, and my first waking thought was, "I bet we'll go under the 124th St bridge today." The bridges are dry-ish and hold tracks well, especialyll when heavy rains mean the sandbars are flooded. But when I met with the five other people who were gathered there to help run this Tracking Club, they mutinied. "No more bridges!" cried Joe. "We were there the past three months!" So Chris suggested scoping out the Redmond Watershed area. Off we went. Even if it meant sign tracking rather than a lot of clear prints, at least we wouldn't be under a bridge.

Maybe it was the heavy rain, or maybe past participants were worried we would wind up tracking deer mice under bridges again, but a small group of three people showed up. I'll speak for myself and say I had a fantastic time wandering through the woods with some very skilled trackers, looking at everything from edible plants to salamander eggs. Everyone got the chance to identify salamander eggs by feel, which was a lot of fun. Snags next to the water's edge led to a good mystery: both beavers and woodpeckers leave wood chips as a sign of their feeding. But given a handful of random chips, could you separate the beaver from the woodpecker chips?

There was a place where a large woodpecker had been pecking into a live cedar. The cedar tree was only 10 inches in diameter--probably small for a nest. No obvious insect sign in there. I have since noticed a similar hole on a cedar near my house. Any ideas what the birds are pecking for?

Rain or not, I had a blast during Tracking Club-- a big hats off to the participants and the stalwart team of trackers and scouts who make it possible. Roaming through the woods exploring with a team of knowledgeable fun-loving people felt like a powerful way to get engaged with the questions of the landscape. Let's get out from under bridges more often.

"Why did the mink go under the bridge?" December Tracking Club

Kelly Staples inspecting an insect trail.

About 20 folks braved a cold and foggy day in the Snoqualmie Valley for Tracking Club today. After a careful inspection of Chinook Bend Park which yielded several elk trails but not much else, station guides settled on holding the day under one of the valley's bridges.

Species encountered under the bridge included:

• Bobcat tracks
• Deer mouse tracks
• Opposum tracks
• Salamder tracks
• Several insects trails
• Racoon tracks
• Beaver feeding sign
• Bat scat
• Perching bird tracks
• 2 American robin nests

Jenn Wolfe explains the key features of Mink tracks.

• Mink tracks
• Muskrat tracks
• Eastern Cottontail
• Barn owl pellets
• Frog tracks
• Weasel tracks
• Rat tracks
• the mandible of a vole
• some mystery scats I believe were from rock doves (though Jonathan Goff remained skeptical).

Mink (Neovison vison) tracks from the edge of the Snoqualmie River.

Station Guide Chris Byrd, explains the ins and outs of insect feeding sign on a dogwood bush.

October Tracking Club: Now with Bears and Salmon!

Second Tracking Club of the season: Bears! Salmon! The sandy beaches were littered with carcasses of spent salmon spreading their nutritious rotting selves over the landscape, and live ones splashing in the shallows. The tracks of two black bears made their way through the sandy cottonwood forest down to the river’s edge. The trails made for a great tracking club.

This time we split our ranks and simultaneously conducted a tracking assessment for members of WAS’s Tracking Intensive course. This meant we explored two separate sand bars during the morning finding everything from jumping mouse tracks to beaver scat to the hefty black bear. The mustelids and the cats stayed home, but many of the other usual suspects were present. My favorite station was a dead salmon with it’s brains chewed out. Our question was “who did this?” There were large flat compressions in the grass leading away from the fish, a ragged hole in the head, and three evenly spaced slices over an inch long near it’s tail. There were signs of bears eating salmon all up and down the shore.

A black bear retrieves a salmon from a stream on the British Columbia Coast. Photo © David Moskowitz

Tracking Club on Sept 24th

For this club meeting, we had 6 experienced station guides. Our favorite spot to hold tracking club was closed for conservation upgrades to the riverbanks, so we headed under bridge we knew often harbored a wide variety of species.  

We were rewarded with nearly 15 potential stations including bobcat, mink, muskrat, bat, coyote, otter, beaver, and even a hummingbird nest. We also saw track or sign for at least three larger birds including an owl. A beaver had chewed a branch off at a height near our heads, and two animals had left scat in the same exact location. It was an outstanding day, despite the fact that I fell in the river. I did an unexpected otter slide while exploring tracks on an upended tree some little ways off shore. We decided not to use that spot as a station.  

We had a great time talking out the various mysteries with the participants, and Chris Byrd shared no fewer than 5 new vocabulary words for describing dentition on the tiny vole mandible we picked out of an owl pellet.

Dates for future Tracking Clubs and other information can be found on the WAS website under Wildlife Tracking Courses. I’ve also put them here for easy access:  

Dates for 2011-2012 - Saturdays - Sept 17, Oct 15, Nov 19, Jan 21, Feb 18, March 17, April 21, May 19. We meet at the WAS office at 8:45 am. See you there in October for a fun boost to your dirt time.